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Editor’s Note: Each week Maynard Webb, former CEO of LiveOps and the former COO of eBay, will offer candid, practical, and sometimes surprising advice to entrepreneurs and founders. To submit a question, write to Webb at dearfound…
It’s common knowledge that multitasking isn’t effective. The brain takes extra time shifting between tasks, which can take longer than it would have if you did each task by itself. What if you looked at your workweek in the same light? Rahul Vohra, founder and CEO of the email platform Superhuman, found that mixing tasks in a day can lead to an ineffective way to run your week.
“Anyone who has been in a managerial role will run into this problem,” he says. “Their one-on-one [meetings] will be randomly dispersed throughout the week, team meetings happen whenever everybody happens to be free, and there is little time to focus and do deep work. This is the complete opposite of running a company with intentionality.”
Instead, Vohra suggests implementing a staggered calendar, a method that everyone at Superhuman follows:
How it works
Mondays are reserved for one-on-one meetings, and team meets are held on Tuesdays and/or Wednesdays. Simple, but effective.
“If you run a team, do your team meeting on Wednesdays and stack all your one-on-ones on Tuesday,” says Vohra. “If your reports run teams, ask them to do their team meetings on Tuesdays and stack all their one-on-ones on Mondays. And if their reports run teams, then stagger this whole thing by another day.”
The benefits
Taking a staggered approach to calendars has a number of benefits. First, information and knowledge can move through the company quickly and efficiently.
“Small company can react and fix things, but as companies scale, information moves slowly,” says Vohra. “If there is a problem on the front line, it can get discussed in a one-on-one on Monday. If necessary, it can be resolved by leadership on Wednesday. It takes at most two days for information to travel like this.”
Another benefit is that problems are often solved along the way, saving a leader’s time. “For example, in your Wednesday team meeting you might hear, ‘This problem came up on Monday, we discussed it as a team on Tuesday, and here’s the solution we’d like to go with,’” says Vohra. “By the time things reach me, they usually arrive with a solution.”
When you stagger meetings, you leave days open for deep work. Leaders will have Monday, much of Wednesday, and all of Thursday and Friday free to do the tasks that only they can do and which requires their full concentration. While the calendar is designed for C-level leaders, Vohra says the entire company will benefit with days freed up to do deep work.
If a fire comes up on an off-day, determine if it truly is a fire or if it can be delegated. “I estimate that [a staggered calendar] adds 10 hours of productive time back to my week,” says Vohra. “It gives me days back, but it also takes care of those five to 10 minutes of downtime that are between meetings when they’re spread throughout the week. Those minutes eat into the day. You don’t have any of that downtime when you keep to this schedule.”
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An interesting fact I recently learned is Margaret Atwood is a chronic procrastinator. In a recent interview, the celebrated author of The Handmaid’s Tale told psychologist Adam Grant that she often avoids writing by doing laundry, scrolling the news, and even watching Captain Underpants. Atwood also says she considers herself lazy. But since 1967, she’s published dozens of award-winning novels, short fiction and poetry collections, children’s books, graphic novels, and non-fiction books.
Atwood’s self-described laziness is clearly at odds with her vast creative output. She rationalizes the dichotomy wit this simple equation, which she describes to Grant: “Take the number of years I’ve been alive and divide it by the number of books I’ve written. They accumulate.”
Is Atwood productive? Who cares! She is the mind behind literary masterpieces. While she might question her own work habits, what matters to her fans and onlookers is her creativity, or her original voice and perspective on the world. Ultimately, it is Atwood’s creative contribution that will endure—not how she crushed her to-do lists.
I often write about productivity. And the company I built helps organizations and individuals to be more productive, but it’s not my singular passion.
All the tools and strategies towards productivity should equip us to make something meaningful. The online world may be hungry for productivity hacks and achieving “inbox zero,” but most of us long to embrace our inner artist, entrepreneur, or humanitarian.
Creativity as born out of productivity
Productivity is a concept that gained traction during the Industrial Revolution. Factory owners needed to measure workers’ performance and ensure consistent production. In the knowledge economy, work isn’t straightforward, and our output is more difficult to assess.
According to Rahaf Harfoush, the author of Hustle & Float: Reclaim Your Creativity and Thrive in a World Obsessed with Work, we’re still applying outdated concepts of productivity to abstract, creative work. “Today, knowledge workers are facing a big challenge,” Harfoush said in a recent TED video. “We’re expected to be constantly productive and creative in equal measure.”
As we’ve shifted into a digital economy, we’ll soon reach what Behance co-founder Scott Belsky calls the “productivity-creativity inversion,”
where the return on human energy spent on creativity exceeds that spent on productivity. Big data, machine-learning, and AI will crunch the numbers, gather data, manage accounts, and do the busywork that clogs our to-do lists. “With technology taking care of productivity,” Belsky writes in Wired, “we humans will produce value by doing what only we can do: thinking and acting creatively, producing something entirely new.”
If you’re ready to tackle what matters, here are three tactics to help you make the shift. It’s easy to be seduced by productivity, but in my experience, you’ll gain far more peace, satisfaction, and happiness by prioritizing your creativity.
Try a maker’s schedule
In 2009, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham wrote an influential essay about two different scheduling styles. Leaders and managers are typically ruled by their calendars. Their days break into meeting-sized chunks and they need to quickly switch focus. Managers measure their productivity by making good decisions and offering effective directions.
Makers are the developers, writers, designers, and innovators who need big chunks of time for focused work. For makers, productivity means original work. “When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster,” Graham, the psychologist, writes. “A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”
Give your creativity the upper hand with a maker’s schedule. If you have to mix in meetings, try block scheduling, which batches similar work to avoid changing mental gears. Answer emails in a single block, schedule appointments back to back, and reserve large time slots for creative thinking.
Slow your inflow
Multitasking is a villain that can steal your creative energy. Juggling work with videos, social media posts, articles, emails, and podcasts can drown out the inner voice that whispers new insights. “Excessive consumption and inflow inhibits creativity, negatively impacts our ability to do deep work and reduces our cumulative output,” writes author and entrepreneur, Srinivas Rao.
Too much inflow also leads to decision fatigue and lowers your attention span, which could harm your mental health, says Rao. To slow the tide, try going analog. Instead of opening a digital document, handwrite or sketch your ideas first. Take the time to hear your own thoughts and limit how much you consume from others.
Make space for a mental default mode
Creative professionals know that innovation on demand can be a slog. Fresh ideas don’t always emerge when you need them. But as former Twitter vice-president Bruce Daisley writes in Harvard Business Review, there’s mounting evidence that a mug of Bulletproof coffee and a steely resolve isn’t the best way to promote creativity.
The unfocused mental state that naturally occurs while you shower, drift off to sleep, or gaze out a window triggers the brain’s default mode network.
These neural regions activate when you’re focused on internal processes, like retrieving memories and feeling physical sensations.
If you want to be creative, it’s essential to make space for unconscious activity. Tune out the noise and tune in to yourself. “If we do truly value the originality of creative thought,” writes Daisley, “then it’s time to recognize that productivity and creativity often exist in opposition to one another. Productivity is focus, creativity is ‘unfocus.’”
Aytekin Tank is the founder of JotForm, a popular online form builder. Established in 2006, JotForm allows customizable data collection for enhanced lead generation, survey distribution, payment collections, and more.
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