Ep. 063 -How to Be a Productivity Ninja with Graham Allcott
Looking to revolutionise your productivity game in 2024? This is the podcast episode for you!
The Company Doctor, Gary Gamp is joined by productivity expert Graham Allcott who shares his top tips for working efficiently and thinking effectively. He offers practical advice such as structuring to-do lists around attention levels and prioritising physical actions, whilst also highlighting the importance of reflection and planning time each week.
Key takeaways from this episode include:
Using the 40-20-40 method to manage inefficient meetings.
How describing physical actions can help to overcome procrastination.
Why adopting a 4 day work aligns with our natural limits of diminishing returns.
How to establish simple systems and habits to get more of the right things done.
Gary Gamp: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garygamp
George Clode: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgeclode
Graham Allcott: https://www.grahamallcott.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamallcott/
Highlights:
“I started my business “Think Productive” in 2009 and we've grown exponentially since then. So I tend to apply a lot of the learning within my own business and then bring that back to teach everyone from Google to eBay to British Airways to Disney and everyone in between.” - 2:35 - Graham Allcott
“The book is all about how to manage attention, not time, because you can't manage time. Managing attention is hard in a world where we are constantly inundated with information, and we are strapped to devices that are there to take our attention away. And it also starts from a very human perspective. So the first words in the book are “Dear Human Being”, and it's like, you're going to screw this up, you're not to be perfect, that's okay. Let's start there, rather than this very unrealistic perfectionist, way that a lot of those books tend to have” - 6:30 - Graham Allcott
“If you are listening to this today, and you are feeling stressed and overwhelmed, and you've got too much to do, then a really great starting point is to say no to some things. Create an hour of time in your diary, where you can be less distracted, and just sit there with pen and paper and get all the things that are swirling around your head, out of your head.” - 8:05 - Graham Allcott
“Henry Ford, once said, thinking is the hardest work there is, which is a probable reason, so few engage in it. And I think, often as a society, we feel really guilty about the idea of making space to do quality thinking. But actually, it's quality thinking that gives us motivation, it's quality thinking that helps us to prioritise in the right way, put our minds onto the right things and eliminate some of the stuff that we want to do a bit less often.” - 10:37 - Graham Allcott
“Most people spend far too long in meetings, most meetings that are an hour could be half an hour, a lot of meetings could be an email, and so on. When we think about the time and attention that we're spending on a meeting, we should think about it in the sense of 40-20-40. 40% of our time and attention should be the pre-work that we're doing before the meeting starts, 20% of our time and attention should be the meeting itself and then 40% should be doing the things that we say we're going to do at the end of the meeting.” - 21:52 - Gary Gamp / George Clode / Graham Allcott
“My bigger vision and hope for the world is that if we can start to get to a place where AI can eliminate a lot of the low value work and free us up to just do really high quality thinking and bigger thinking, then in the future, could we get to a place where most of our economy and most of our work is actually in humans thinking?” - 25:40 - Graham Allcott
