so naturally we get tied into personal productivity advice blogs videos and articles
telling us what the next hot app is wink wink that's probably us but when it boils down to it
it's about finding the strategies to protect yourself from your own company today we're
exploring why companies have personal productivity and they made it a personal problem and how modern
work is adapted to work with us today's video is kindly sponsored by twist we've been using
them for three years as a way to asynchronous communicate you can check them out in the link
in description so a way that we work actually feels uniquely designed to keep us distracted
overwhelmed and constantly putting out fires according to Harvard Business Review collaborative
work is a time spent on email I am phone and video calls and it's risen by 50 or more over the past
decade to consume 85 or more of most people's work weeks and meetings are a fantastic example of this
a study public by Microsoft found that time spent in meetings has steadily increased over the past
two years to the point that workers now spend 253 percent more time in meetings than they did before
the pandemic other elements of our day include teams in slack type of communication and according
to a 2020 data collected by The Wall Street Journal the medium response time for work emails
was 72 minutes for slack messages the medium response time dropped from to just 16 minutes and
18 seconds now this can be really damaging when it comes to quality work getting done and producing
and a better and meaningful things to do and time to do it in the solution to this is two mini
meetings isn't time blocking it's actually fewer meetings the solution to too many interruptions
isn't a Pomodoro Timer it's fewer interruptions so these are six ways actually seven that you can use
asynchronous communication to improve that here's some actionable advice around it so the first is
setting explicit guidelines around response times for your teammates experiment with what works
for your team you may be surprised that the world doesn't stop turning when you give people 24 hours
to respond to your messages so being able to adapt how your response times react we will redefine
how they think of you sometimes people want stuff fast but others times it's maybe good to test the
boundaries and understand and show them that we don't need to make this incredibly fast turnaround
it's obviously dependent on a lot of different factors but sometimes when we set our standards of
responses so fast people get annoyed when that is even doubled so just something to note especially
when you think about 16 minutes and 18 seconds to reply to a slack um you know humanly it's probably
not always healthy to reply within that period of time so maybe even think about dosing that out if
you can and obviously depending on the context of priority and deadlines and things like like that
number two is use tools that support asynchronous communication to replace meetings and real-time
messaging apps a really good example of that is Loom whenever I try and go for a meeting I try
and be like okay could this be a loom or like a pre-recording so that I can send it and actually
be able to like have all the context to that and or actually respond through a slow version of
email in a sense as an asynchronous communication but obviously we use twist between teammates which
slows things down which is really nice and sort of brings a bit of clarity to responding our own time
number three is set up a separate Communication channel for emergencies only this can be a great
way to get instant and Urgent notifications the do estimate fees telegram I didn't know that but
it's actually something that having that layer of okay this is an emergency because there will
there always is emergency but it's being able to determine what an emergency is versus you know
what is an emergency everything in the work seems an emergency it's a typical thing that we see if
you ask a friend one week how's work really busy the next week if you ask them again they may say
really really busy it's our natural human instinct continually to sort of adapt and sort of explain
why work is so busy all the time but really is it determined by the sort of emergencies it's
important to see that differentiation what is an emergency what isn't number four is to invest in
a team-winded transparency and documentation so everyone can find the information and context
of what they need without having to ask this is something we do in notion and it helps us provide
a pretty decent outlet for when Steve wants to find a script or a bit of information connected
to something he can find everything there without necessarily having to ask me which is nice number
five let teammates set their own schedule so you can they can work when they're most productive and
disconnect fully when they've done the job this is going to be huge in the next couple of years
energy levels and we always have that assumption everyone is optimized at 9am and by the end of
the 5 p.m you know they they dip out but at the same time we always assume people have these
sort of routines and schedules in place but it really isn't the case we should be allowed
to work a flexible schedule because some people work better at different times some people have
things that are going on and we should be able to adapt to those routines especially with how we're
working now but I'm sure this will come more prevalent in the future number six is measure
success by the work that actually getting done not the hours that someone spends on it which or the
speed that they actually respond to messages this is so important because it's so common for people
like okay they didn't respond fast enough it means they didn't get it done you should judge it on the
quality of the end product and number seven make sure team leaders are modeling good asynchronous
app is not responding to immediately to messages people won't trust it unless your boss's actions
align with those words and that's a really good statement about the team leaders being the role
models in this case so I hopefully you found this as a useful guide to understanding why personal
productivity becomes a work problem and how you can embrace say synchronous work to improve that
you can check out twist below we're big on asynchronous hence why we're we're partnered
with twist this month to dive into that and I'm super excited to hear some of your opinions in
the comments below make sure to check out their newsletter which has over 6500 members reimagining
what the future of work can be and a big thank you to everyone who listened in today thank you very
much folks talk to you all very soon thank you very much for watching today's video if you're
interested in checking out some more you'll find them here and also you can subscribe to as well
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help you find the perfect productivity tool you can find at linked inscription