Prefer to listen? Listen to Dermot’s audio recording below:

Have you ever noticed the strong connection between attention and traction? The things that are front of mind for us, that are most pressing, that are holding our attention, are the things that tend to get traction and progress. Every day we shift multiple pieces of work forward and may experience a sense of satisfaction from all this positive activity.

But what if we have a bias towards creating traction for other people’s priorities rather than our own? What if we are holding only some of the things in the front of our mind that deserve our time, energy and attention?

At Adapt, so much of what we teach in our productivity programs is about balance. And one of the critical ones we need to get right is the balance between the reactive and the proactive. I worry that we can sometimes fall into the trap of reacting to the work that other people demand of us, without balancing that up with the work that we should be demanding of ourselves to truly fulfil our role.

To this end we encourage participants to take time out each month to get clarity about their Top 10 priorities for the month ahead. We teach them how to go through an exercise to list and prioritise ten big-picture priorities they would like to get traction on over the coming month. The value of taking the time to do this piece of thinking is to gain clarity and focus, but also to create traction.

You see, when you get clear about the things that are most important to you, it brings them to the front of your mind. These proactive priorities join all the more pressing priorities that are sitting there. They don’t necessarily take over, but they sit side-by-side with them and therefore have more chance of being shifted forward.

I strongly believe what has my attention gets traction, so I try to make sure my priorities are visible and top of mind. Think about whether you have a habit of clarifying what is important to you over the coming month. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Make a list of the priorities, issues or opportunities that deserve your attention. Try to avoid listing just urgent things – imagine you could wave a magic wand and create a limitless amount of available time over the next month. What would you put your time, energy, and attention into if that were true? Maybe these things should be on your list.

What you achieve in life is a direct result of what you do, and what you pay attention to.

On the weekend I did one of my favourite things – built Ikea furniture. No really, I love it. It is like Lego for me, a creative exercise with step-by-step instructions. As usual, I got myself into a bit of trouble. About halfway into building a set of shelves, I ran into a dead end. The part I needed to put on next would not fit. I went back to the instructions, retraced my steps, and low and behold, I had not followed the instructions carefully enough.

A few steps before, the instructions clearly showed how to put on one of the shelving brackets, and it clearly showed what NOT to do. Do not put on the bracket with the holes on the top. Make sure the holes line up on the bottom. This was my problem. Further down the track I could not fit the shelf because the holes were in the wrong position. I had to take it all apart again and redo the build the right way this time.

Even though I messed up, I believe that Ikea instructions are really good at helping the builder to avoid mistakes like this. They clearly show you what to do, and what NOT to do. The problem was, in my enthusiasm, and maybe arrogant self-confidence, I did not read the instructions fully.

When we delegate in the workplace, it’s also a good idea to tell people what to do, and what NOT to do. Ikea know the common mistakes people make when building their products that just lead to frustration and rework, so they communicate them upfront. With your experience. you may also know the common mistakes the people you delegate to could make. It is worth taking the time to delegate properly and thinking through what it is you want them to deliver. Include with this any relevant insights into the traps they should try to avoid when doing the work. Of course, be sure you take their experience into account, as you don’t want to teach your team how to suck eggs.

A lot of time and energy is wasted on rework and on fixing mistakes, often because work was not delegated properly in the first place. There is an old saying – ‘If it is worth doing, it is worth doing well.’ We could add to that with – ‘If it is worth delegating, it is worth delegating well.’

After three amazing months in Italy, it’s now back to working and living in Australia. One of my goals for the trip away was to improve my almost non-existent Italian, which I felt was important because my partner Vera is originally from Milan. Well, the time away has certainly got me heading in the right direction.  I’m definitely a long, long way from being fluent, but it was an excellent start, and I now have more confidence and knowledge to continue my journey to la dolce vita. What I do next will determine my eventual level of Italian expertise.

I suspect the same is true of our productivity training. Certainly, some of the people that attend our training have life-changing experiences, adopt every lesson and strategy immediately, and completely re-engineer how they work. They become “fluent” in Smart Work almost overnight. However, for many others the training is a starting point. It sets them off in the right direction. I am completely OK with that, so long as they work to sustain their new behaviours, and to build on them incrementally over time. That is the key for me. Are they still applying their important learning takeaways six months, or a year, or five years later?

If you have attended an Adapt training program, ask yourself, ‘What were the key changes I initially committed to making?’ Am I still applying them? If not, what do you need to do to get them back on track? Some strategies might be:

• Read the Smart Workbook again (You did read it right?)
• Review the online resources from the course
• Go back to your course notes
• Recommit to your initial intentions after the training
• Get the inbox to zero
• Clean up your to-do bar, and get all your current tasks in there

I don’t think it’s realistic to expect everyone to achieve overnight and sustained changes when we attend training or learning events. But we can all commit to revisiting the ideas and strategies that hit the mark at the time and adjusting our behaviours accordingly.  It doesn’t matter how long ago you attended one of our programs, it’s what you do next that is what really matters.

Ciao a tutti, arrivederci in Australia.

So, here I am, back in Oz after our trip of a lifetime to Italy and Europe. So many highlights, both personal and from a work point of view. One of them was spending a weekend with our friends Tiziana and Eric in Amsterdam. They showcased their beautiful city so well, especially when they took us on the canals in their own boat. On the Sunday they organised a surprise lunch, which involved taking the boat through the city canals, out to the Amstel River and to a small village on the outskirts of the city.

We pulled up to a dock outside the restaurant (how lucky are we), and made our way in for an Indonesian feast (which it turns out is pretty much the Dutch national dish, as Indonesia was a Dutch colony).

On arrival, Tiziana and Eric looked a bit disappointed, as the table they had sat at last time by the water was occupied. The one we were allocated was not just away from the waterfront, but it was in the sun. When they booked, they had asked for a waterfront table, so understandably they wanted to rectify the situation. So, Eric masterfully went into what I would call a collaborative negotiation.

He did not get irate, or make demands, but rather invited the manager to work with him to find a solution. He said that he was fine not being by the water but would prefer not to sit in the sun. He asked, ‘What could we do to make that possible?’ After some discussion, the manager talked to his team, and then suggested that they could move our table into another space which was not in the sun. A few minutes later we were sitting in a very acceptable position having an exceptional lunch.

I reckon the key to Eric’s successful negotiation was the collaborative nature of it. There was no ‘I want’, or ‘You should’, but rather ‘How could’ and ‘What if’. I love the question he asked. It was not an ultimatum, but an invitation. It was not closed and threatening, but open and explorative. Eric invited the manager to work with him to solve the problem in a way that worked for his team, and for us.

I wonder if there is a lesson to be learnt here about how we negotiate work and deadlines? When we are busy, and need inputs from others in our organisation, do we sometimes negotiate the work in a more adversarial way? Can we sometimes just expect that our needs are met, and our urgent demands are fulfilled, regardless of the other persons other priorities?

Highly productive people know how to get work done with and through other people. The most effective people do this in a collaborative way, rather than an adversarial way. They offer invitations to collaborate for a win/win scenario, rather than making demands. Think about the people who you like working with the most, and you might find that this is their preferred style. Of course, there are times when we all need to be directive, but that should be a tool that is used only when necessary.

So next time you need something from a colleague, think about the invitation to collaborate that you could extend, and see if you get a better result.

Ciao from Trieste, Italy, a truly beautiful part of the World.

I recently overheard a conversation between a team leader and the HR person who supported the team. They were discussing a pulse survey conducted across the team in question. One of the comments from the HR person caught my attention. ‘A common theme coming through from all the respondents was that there was too much work for them to do. They feel overloaded all the time. We need to take this seriously and address this issue’.

‘Too much work’ and ‘Not enough resources’ are phrases I hear a lot from workshop participants and clients. And in many cases teams are asked to do too much, with too few resources to manage all the work. But to jump straight to the conclusion that there is too much work is a mistake in my view. In fact, before we ask, ‘Is there too much work?’, I believe we should ask two other more useful questions, related to what I call ‘Capacity erosion’:

1. Is there too much internal erosion of our team’s capacity?
2. Is there too much external erosion of our team’s capacity?

Capacity erosion refers to the idea that we often allow our capacity to do productive work to be eroded away, bit by bit. Sometimes we do this to ourselves, and sometimes we allow others to do it to us. The Cambridge Dictionary defines capacity as ‘The total amount that can be contained or produced’. In this case we are talking about the total amount of work that can be produced by an individual or a team. And I would further suggest we are talking about the total amount of work that can be produced in a reasonable number of hours. (We can always get more done if we work longer, but that is a not a sustainable solution to this problem).

Our capacity to do work is not just governed by time. Our ability to get work done, and done well, requires not just time, but energy, and focus as well. Of course, we need enough time to get things done, but if we have time but don’t have enough energy to do the task, it is really easy to switch off or procrastinate. If we don’t have enough focus, we can easily allow ourselves to become distracted by other things.

But what if we had enough capacity to get all the required work done, but that capacity was being eroded by our own behaviours or the behaviours of others? What if our capacity was being attacked from within as well as from outside?

Internal capacity erosion

When we are not personally organised, we are at risk of eroding our own capacity. Think of our personal work capacity like the volume of a suitcase (excuse the travel analogy that is coming, I am caught up in a world of packing and unpacking at the moment as we travel through Italy). A suitcase can only fit so many things. If there are too many things to fit easily, then we might feel we have no choice but to leave some out. But if we take the time to fold and organise the contents well, we can fit more into the space. I know this to be true as my partner Vera is a ninja packer! Organising the contents well allows us to maximise the capacity of the case.

Likewise, when we have a good organising system for our work, we can fit more into our available time, energy and focus. We protect our productive capacity when we are organised. But if we are not organised, we create a way of working that makes us feel busy and stressed, with a lot of wasted time, energy and focus. Some examples of things that internally erode our capacity might be:

• Not having a clear system to manage priorities
• Being sloppy with calendar commitments and events
• Constantly reacting to email alerts
• Using your Inbox as a messy filing system and task list
• Working reactively and leaving work until the last minute

All these examples erode the individual’s capacity to get important work done. The good news is these personal productivity issues are easily remedied with some basic training or coaching. It shocks me sometimes how, as workers, we are often expected to be highly productive with little formal guidance on how to do this.

External capacity erosion

Of course, many people are highly organised, but may experience a different form of capacity erosion – one created by their team, peers, stakeholders or even clients. Every time we receive an email, phone call, Microsoft Teams message, meeting invite, interruption, or delegation, we may end up with eroded capacity. When other people are not mindful and purposeful in their interactions with us, it can cause our productivity to drop, and divert our time, energy and focus to less important things. Some examples of this might be:

• Last-minute urgent meeting invites that disrupt our plans
• Too much email noise due to poor use of email
• Thoughtless and unnecessary interruptions
• Poorly designed work processes
• Other people creating urgency by leaving critical work until the last minute

Working with others is complex, and it would be impossible to completely solve this problem. But this type of capacity erosion can be greatly reduced with a bit of work. Unfortunately, many teams have not stopped to examine the different ways that capacity is being eroded across the team. Investing time in raising awareness about the behaviours that cause erosion and putting team agreements in place to shift behaviours is well worthwhile, in my opinion.

So, if your team is under pressure and feels like they are working at, or beyond capacity, don’t jump straight to the question about too much work. First ask yourselves if you have minimised the internal causes of capacity erosion. If not, undertake some personal productivity training as a team to get organised ASAP.

Then, ask yourselves if you have minimised the external erosion. If not, brainstorm all the things that are eroding capacity across the team and put strategies in place to deal with them. If you are still feeling like there is too much work to do after that, then (and only then) explore how you could reduce the workload of the team or increase the resources.

Ok, now I have now reached my capacity to write newsletters when the Italian sun is shining and calling me!

Ciao for now.

It is hard to believe, but twenty years ago today I went down to the Department of Fair Trading and started Adapt Productivity, a business that was little more than an idea in my mind and a passion in my belly.

I remember the date vividly, as it was the 1^st July, the first day of the business year. (You know how I like things to be orderly!) I remember the feeling of excitement as I walked home with my business registration certificate, and then the feeling of terror as I looked at my one-year son and realised that I had to make this work!

Adapt was born from my experience working in the productivity training industry, and my belief that we needed to move away from paper-based planning tools to embrace electronic tools like Microsoft Outlook, and the plethora of personal digital assistants (PDAs) that had become popular with executives in corporate Australia.

In fact, not a lot of people know that Adapt is actually an acronym for Advanced Desktop And PDA Training. My initial idea was to focus solely on the technology, but I soon realised that what people really needed was a practical mix of productivity strategies applied to the technology. The strategies I created evolved into our current core programs, Smart Work, Smart Teams and Smart Leaders.

So, twenty years later, many hundreds of thousands of participants later, and three books later, the Adapt team are still going strong, and are as passionate about productivity as ever. Massive thanks to my support team who have made Adapt the success that it is today. Tony Hall, who joined me nineteen years ago, has been a constant and loyal companion and supporter. Tony has been my wingman through good times and bad.

Matt Lumsdaine, who has been a part of the training team for going on eight years, has added a new dimension to our programs, and a beautiful balance to the team. And of course, our Business Manager, Chauntelle Rakebrandt, who makes everything run so smoothly and allows us to be our best in front of our participants. I resisted having any executive support for many years, but now could not do a quarter of what I do without her. We are a small but passionate team, all focused on creating cutting edge programs and delivering outstanding results. Thank you all for your dedication.

And lastly, thank you to our client companies for your support, year after year. Thank you to the Learning and Development teams that work with us as partners rather than suppliers. And thank you to all our past participants, who have not just embraced the Smart Working strategies, but have sung their praises to others, time and time again.

So, twenty years on, and still going strong. I can’t wait to see what the next twenty years brings!

I am currently enjoying a three-month stint in Europe, part holiday, part family and part work. Myself and my partner Vera are mainly based in her home country of Italy but work recently took me to London to run a session for a UK based client.

On my way back to Italy, I travelled through Stansted airport, on the outskirts of London. It was hectic, being the start of their mid-term break, and every seat and every table in the airport seemed to be full. It was lunchtime, and I was starving, so I decided to try my luck at getting a table in one of the two main restaurants in the airport. There was a 15-minute queue just to be seated, but that was OK – I had plenty of time before my flight. As I waited, I watched the queue and how the staff managed the queue with fascination.

Let me paint a picture in your mind. The queue probably had 20-30 people in it at any one time. It snaked across the entrance to the restaurant, and therefore blocked the exit for people who were leaving. There was a staff member appointed to manage the queue, who at one point decided to split the queue in half, making a 4-metre gap to allow patrons to leave. Good idea. And when he was there to direct people, it worked well.

But he often got called away to sort out issues, and when this happened, everything fell apart. You see, as new people arrived, they did not see that the queue was split in two. They just saw the end of the first half of the queue and joined the end of that. A perfectly reasonable course of action I thought. The airport was busy, they were distracted and just happy that the queue was not too long, and they did not look around to notice another queue starting 4-metres away.

Of course, every time this happened, there would be someone from the second half of the queue who would politely tell the offenders that the queue started back around the corner. Often the manager would come back and end up having to explain the system and move people back to the end. The look of disappointment in people’s faces was hard to watch. The queue manager spent a lot more time, energy and emotion fixing the problem than was necessary in my opinion.

So, what could have been done differently? I think the main issue was that people did not understand the system in play. It was easy to see the queue was split in two, and I believe that if people could have readily seen this, they would have complied and gone to the real end of the queue. In most cases, if people understand your system, they will work in with it. Most people don’t want to work outside the system, they just need to understand the system. A simple sign or barrier at the end of the first half of the queue would have helped everyone to understand the queue system at Stansted.

In the workplace, we also have many systems that we expect others to comply with. But do we always make it easy for them to understand our system? Do we waste a lot of time, energy and stress correcting the situation when people don’t understand the system? Could we do something simple today that would help people understand our system everyday moving forward? I reckon this is a great conversation to have with your team. Ask them what they think wastes their time when they go about their daily work and see if you could put strategies in place to reduce the wasted time. Remember, most people are happy to comply with your system, so long as they know what it is.
Ciao for now. My lunch has arrived at last!

Do you know how long your work generally takes you? If not, you may be missing out on an opportunity to focus yourself, and to negotiate with others.

We recently moved to a new house which has a slightly bigger front and back garden that need mowing on a weekly basis. Now I am not usually this meticulous, but as I cut the new grass on the weekend, I decided to time how long it took so I had a good feeling for the time commitment required. It took me seven minutes at the front, and ten minutes out back. Add on a few minutes to trim the edges and put everything away and we are looking at about 30 minutes all up.

So, how is this relevant to working productively in a busy workplace? Well, I reckon that if we know roughly how long things actually take us, we can plan our time better, as well as negotiate with others with more conviction. I say ‘know how long things actually take’, as we often think we know how long things take, but when we measure the exact duration of a task it is different to what we expected. Things usually take longer than we might guess.

I am not suggesting that you time every task you do, but I believe that measuring the things you do regularly can be helpful. When you are planning your day, it can help to know how long things take so that you don’t over-schedule yourself.

Knowing rough durations can also help when negotiating your workload. It is amazing how other people can make assumptions about how long your work should take. And they often assume things take much less time than they do because they don’t understand the detail of what needs to happen with the task. A client recently shared a story with me about other managers in the business who came to her team with requests for analysis to be done on major contracts. They assumed that this type of request could be turned around in a few hours. The reality was that it usually took a few days minimum, or sometimes a couple of weeks if information needed to be sought offsite. Being armed with this knowledge helped her team to set expectations and negotiate reasonable due dates.

So, it is worth knowing how long things take you to do. Why not take the time to measure some of your key tasks over the next week or two, and make a note of their durations for future reference?

A participant in a recent webinar asked me this very thoughtful question.

Is it worth capturing a task in your task list if it will only take twenty minutes?

We had been discussing the merits of capturing all meetings in your calendar and all priorities in your task list. I sensed that he was struggling with the potential inefficiency of investing the time to write smaller tasks down, rather than just doing them.

For me, the decision to capture something is not influenced by how long it will take. The task could take one minute or one hour – I will still write it down. The more critical question for me is:

Is the task worth doing?

If it is, and I cannot do it now, I capture it. Many of the things in my task list take twenty minutes (see my last newsletter on  ). They are all actions that are worth capturing, and any inefficiency in doing this is made up for in my effectiveness in driving my next-step actions forward and achieving outcomes that have impact.

Irish people, myself included, often struggle with their ‘t’s and ‘th’s. If I need to say the word ‘tree’, my brain will want to say ‘three’, and vice versa. As I approach the dreaded word, I almost have to stop talking, organise the words in my head, and then say them. Thirty-three and a third is a killer by the way! Which makes it slightly ironic that I am talking to you about a new measure of time that I am using that I call a ‘third’.

This is a concept that has been crystalising for me over a few months now. Without consciously aiming to do this, I realised that I have honed the skill of completing many of my more complex activities in units of twenty minutes, or in a third of an hour. I seem to have the ability to deeply focus on something and bring it to completion in a twenty-minute timeslot.

This newsletter will take me about twenty minutes to draft and send to Chauntelle for formatting. A client proposal often takes me twenty minutes. Even meetings usually only take me twenty minutes now that they are predominantly online. I call these units of time ‘thirds’. As there are three of them in an hour, it means I can get some serious work done in that time. I deliberately put this time constraint in place to sharpen my focus, and over time, my fitness has increased around this so I can usually deliver within that time.

Now I know that many will read this and feel that the concept does not apply to their work, as it is more complex and requires more time and focus. But I wonder if this is just the way we have conditioned ourselves over many years of doing our work.

I remember one of my mentors, Pete Cook, telling me many years ago that I spent too much time on crafting my newsletters each week. I used to spend up to half a day writing the draft, and the problem was of course that I frequently procrastinated on doing the work because I was so busy and it was so hard and complex. So, he told me force myself to write the draft in less than thirty minutes. I thought this would be impossible until I tried it, and low and behold, I can now get them done in twenty minutes! (I hope desperately that you still feel that they are useful now you know how little time I put into them).

Now, there are some things that I do to ensure that I am super-focused in that third. I capture ideas constantly so that I always have something to write about. I think about what I am going to write in the spaces in my day, like when I walk the dogs. This means I already have a good feel for what I will write when I sit down. And I minimise all distractions during the third itself. This also applies to my meetings. I plan my week thoroughly, so I am clear about the purpose and outcomes required of every meeting, so I am extremely focused during the meeting itself.

Of course, there is some work and some meetings that require more than a third. So, I apply two or three thirds to the task. But I still think of each third in my day as a unit of time that should produce a significant outcome. I believe that focusing my mind on the task and putting a time constraint in place helps me to get traction with my work and get it to a level of quality that is good enough rather than perfect.

There you go, twenty minutes to write this newsletter and I hope it added some real value for you. Not bad I reckon.