During my 1st year at McKinsey, I got staffed on a weird project.
Our client, a New Jersey-based healthcare company, wanted to figure out whether to enter a seemingly attractive new line of business. And here was the funny thing – two senior folks from the company had already spent a year trying to answer the question.
But they had ended up with hundreds of PowerPoint pages, and no answer.
So now, the company hired McKinsey to answer in 4 weeks, the question they couldn’t answer in a year. 😊
But that was not it. Since the client presentation was in 4 weeks, the near-final version for the partner had to be ready in 3 weeks. So I had to prepare a good first draft in 2 weeks.
I was nervous – if I messed this up, my career would quickly go down the tube. And with a huge student loan hanging on my head, I absolutely needed a well-paying job.
With all these thoughts and an anxious mind, I got down to work.
The first thing that saved me: Deep work
While I had only a couple of weeks, I had one huge advantage: there was nothing to distract me – no meetings, no admin tasks, no interruptions from colleagues. And it was the pre-smartphone era, when WhatsApp and Facebook were not around to interrupt us every few minutes.
When at work, I would typically put my BlackBerry away and the sole purpose of my existence – from 9 am to midnight – was to work on the project with full focus. So I could spend much of my day on deep work: doing online research, thinking, and writing my document. I would also be interviewing experts or analyzing data.
But why was it such a force multiplier?
- When you focus, the number of attention switches goes down dramatically (say by 90%).
- Every attention switch makes your brain work harder – the way you would feel if you walked with an extra 10kg backpack.
- When you switch from one task to another, the previous task persists in your mind creating an extra load called ‘attention residue.’
- When you switch your attention to an email or YouTube, you may enter a rabbit hole and waste a lot of time before returning to the original task.
- Every time you return to the original task, it takes extra time and effort to remember where you were, and what you were thinking.
- In deep focus mode, your brain connects the dots faster and generates insights that you would otherwise miss. Hence you progress quickly.
Deep work helped me do in 2 weeks, the work that would have taken a few months.
So it should not be surprising that dozens of our HabitStrong program participants also have reported that when they focus, their productivity goes up 3-5x (or more).
But this was only 50% of the answer – the remaining 50% comes next.
The second thing that saved me: Task clarity
Since we had just 2-3 weeks to deliver a few months’ worth of insights, the last thing I wanted was to do some work, only to later discard it on realizing that we should have done something totally different. Rework and waste are deadly enemies of productivity, and it has happened to me in other McKinsey projects.
But this time, I could not afford it. Also, since the data was all over the place, and I had to give sharp, strategic answers, I had to be clear about the specific things I was going to do.
So I shortlisted a few specific questions to be answered and limited most of my expert interviews and analyses to those questions.
When deep work and task clarity came together, it was a gamechanger. Within two weeks, I had a 100-page presentation deck, with an answer.
Phew – I could finally breathe!
Learnings for us
So what is the lesson for us here?
First lesson: Deep work is like a laser beam that concentrates your attention and cognitive energy, massively multiplying its power. Don’t dissipate your attention, by multitasking, switching attention, or giving distractions a free reign.
Second lesson: Deep work is necessary but not sufficient – if that laser beam of your focus falls on low-value tasks, you get low-value outcomes.
Then how do we identify high-value tasks? Prioritize. Otherwise, you will get sucked into email, Slack, or Teams messages, and most of your days will go into firefighting.
And since most of us are unsure how to prioritize, try this:
- Top-down prioritization: Select 1-2 goals for the next 3-6 months, and break them into smaller tasks. Include these into your list of tasks. Repeat this exercise at least once every month or two. It needs 30 min or so.
- Bottom-up prioritization: Sort your tasks on a matrix, based on either “Urgent vs. Important” or “Effort vs. Impact.” (Most prefer the former, but I use the latter since I don’t have many urgent tasks.)
- Deep work: Pick one high-priority task each day for 1-2 hours of deep work. (I do 25 min sprints, followed by breaks for 5 minutes or more.)
This will help you deliver more work impact in 1-2 weeks than you normally do in a month. And you can do this without working 70-hour work weeks.
Don’t take my word for it – the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I hope you try it out.
I would love to hear your thoughts. Please hit reply and share.
Rajan
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Want to go to the next level?
If you are looking to take your high-performance to another level, there are many nuances you need to master.
For example, while prioritization is simple in theory, in practice, people face many challenges, such as:
- Should you prioritize top-down or bottom-up?
- How do you prioritize small urgent tasks vs. important long-term projects?
- When you have a long list of tasks – say 50 or 75 – is prioritization even practical?
- If you always work on the highest priority tasks, how will the chores get done?
Similarly, when it comes to deep work, how do you put aside external interruptions as well as those coming from inside your own mind (e.g., restlessness)?
That’s exactly what we fix in Zen Productivity.
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And you won’t be doing this alone. I’ll personally help you troubleshoot your challenges in our live group Q&A sessions. So if you ever get stuck, we’ll get you back on track.
If you are looking for a faster path to high performance, use this link to sign up for Zen Productivity and start building your future: https://www.habitstrong.com/zen-productivity/