How to be more productive at work

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘How to be more productive at work’

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Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick. In this episode, I get some top-quality advice on how to be more productive, because we all want to achieve more and produce better work without increasing the time we spend at our desks. But so many things are stopping us from doing that. Is it the overflowing email inbox? Is it the demands of our smartphones or are we just a bit disorganised?

For some insights, I turn to one of the busiest and most productive of my FT colleagues, senior columnist Tim Harford. As well as writing for the FT Tim hosts a podcast, presents the BBC radio programme More or Less and has written 10 books. The latest, The Truth Detective, is aimed at 10-year-olds who want to think more clearly. Tim, I’ve known you for a long time and I edited your columns when I was on the FT Magazine, and since then I’ve dealt with a lot of FT writers. You remain the most efficient of them all while also being charming to deal with. So what’s the secret to your productivity while staying calm? Because it is unusual.

Tim Harford
I’m blushing now! So nice of you to say that. This is not how I think of myself. Anyway, there is no secret. But there’s no one thing that helps you be more productive or stay on top of stuff. This is a hard problem. It’s a work in progress. I’m still trying to figure out quite how it works.

Isabel Berwick
So you do share your work in progress with us. And I really like your writing about how to manage our emails, which I have a particular problem with, and I love this line: “We do not often refer to the email inbox as a bully, but the metaphor is apt”. Can you explain to the listeners how our inboxes bully us? ’Cause I think we all understand it, but it’s interesting to know why.

Tim Harford
I’m as guilty of this as anybody. I feel this too. You just feel you have to keep checking and you feel that you have to keep checking because you never know whether something important is gonna show up there. That’s something you have to respond to quickly. And of course, it’s mostly not urgent. It’s mostly completely ignorable when most of the things in your inbox you could just delete and nothing bad would happen. But it could be an urgent request from your boss to do something to solve some problem immediately. And so you just have to keep checking. And then while you’re there, of course, all this other stuff that isn’t important is distracting you from doing the real work.

Isabel Berwick
So sometimes I miss important emails because there’s so much other stuff there. What, are you an inbox-zero person?

Tim Harford
I am. Inbox-zero is I think often misunderstood. So inbox-zero means you shouldn’t have anything in your inbox. It just means you need to keep making decisions about what’s in your inbox and if something is gonna take more time to deal with, it needs to be somewhere else, like not in your inbox with all the other junk. So I have an action folder. I mean, we can get into the technical details, but basically you put stuff that needs action that’s going to take time somewhere else. And then all the stuff that is coming into your inbox, you either immediately reply or you put it in your action folder or you delete and then there’s nothing there. I mean, you can do other clever stuff like block stuff. I mean, if someone is sending me stuff and I think I don’t ever want to hear from this person again, they are just wasting my time, it’s abusive or it’s a PR pitch that’s completely irrelevant. All I’m ever gonna get from this person is more irrelevant PR pitches, you just block them. You’ll never see them again.

Isabel Berwick
So create a folder for the stuff that you need to go back to.

Tim Harford
So Gmail has a functionality called multiple inboxes. So what you can do is you could set up two or three inboxes so that when you load up your Gmail, you see your inbox, your actual inbox ie, here’s the stuff that you’ve just come in and then you would see a second inbox below it, which for me is the action inbox. That’s, I mark with the yellow star, doesn’t matter. And then below that, there’s stuff I’m waiting for a response to, and below that there’s stuff I might want to read some time.

Isabel Berwick
So I want to move on to a little bit about, I’ve written recently about how addictive smartphones are. So up to 85 per cent of smartphone use is during working hours globally, and I know they’re massive time sucks. Why are they so addictive? What is it in our behaviour patterns that makes us unable to put them down?

Tim Harford
I think of them as a bit like slot machines. So you’re getting this intermittent reinforcement. The classic research by BF Skinner, the inventor of the Skinner box, the original behaviourist; he had pigeons in a box and they could peck levers and they would get pellets. And what he found, it was originally I think he’d run out of pellets or he had a limited supply of pellets. So it was kind of an accident. He was trying to save on pellets. So he only occasionally gave them a pellet when they picked the right lever. And he thought, well, that’s not gonna be as effective because they’re not getting the same kind of reward. Actually, the intermittent reward was more motivating. The pigeons were more interested. When I peck this lever and sometimes I get a pellet and sometimes I don’t, then I’m really interested.

So that’s how slot machines work. It’s how email works. It’s how most social media works. You never know when you’re gonna get a bit of reinforcement. Something interesting’s gonna happen. Something horrible’s gonna happen. And it’s always there. I mean, there’s a lot of other stuff going on. People get paid enormous amounts of money to get us to look at these things in our pockets. But that is the basic story. And I would not pretend for a moment that I’ve got it cracked. And what I try to do is, well, put the smartphone away at bedtime, put it downstairs charging, far away from where I am so I’m not tempted to look at it, put it somewhere away from where I’m working if I’m trying to concentrate or switch into aeroplane mode. You can switch into aeroplane mode all day and tell people you were on an aeroplane. I don’t have social media apps on my phone at all. I try to limit what’s on the phone, but even then, I mean they are very addictive and I do spend too much time on my phone and I give a bad example to my children and I wouldn’t want to pretend otherwise.

Isabel Berwick
So we’re talking about productivity. It’s become an incredibly hot topic. There are so many gurus, blogs, Instagram posts. I mean, you write about all sorts of things, but you’ve been writing about this on and off for a long time. Why is it suddenly such a hot topic?

Tim Harford
I mean, it feels like it’s been a hot topic for a while. I first read a productivity advice book when I was a teenager that I think my dad had been given on some course and I kind of got hold of and I found it very interesting, although it was weird because it was full of talk about secretaries and filing cabinets and stuff, and I’m like a 14-year-old boy — I don’t know what this stuff means, but it obviously rubbed off on me. I think it is interesting. It’s an increasing problem partly because these smartphones, digital devices have subjected us to new levels of distraction while at the same time making it possible to do incredible things incredibly quickly. And . . . But I think the reason it’s a perennial problem is ’cause the modern knowledge worker, it’s often very vague what they should be doing, what they should be saying yes to, what they should be saying no to, what the priorities are, where they’re supposed to work, how they’re supposed to work, what their output actually is. I mean, as journalists, at least we’re able to say, look, I wrote this column, I wrote this article, I produced this podcast. A lot of knowledge workers aren’t even in that situation.

Isabel Berwick
And has it risen in tandem with the idea of overwhelm as a concept, which I see a lot here? For myself, I look at productivity tips and you know, help as a way of combating overwhelm. It feels like a sort of psychological trick in some ways.

Tim Harford
Yeah, And it doesn’t help though, does it?

Isabel Berwick
No. (Laughter)

Tim Harford
So the best book on this is Oliver Burkeman’s book, Four Thousand Weeks. Great book. But another thing I find very insightful on this is David Allen, who wrote Getting Things Done, which is a bible for a lot of productivity people. He says, imagine that everything on your to-do list, on all of your to-do list, everything you could possibly want to do. Imagine it was all done. You’ve got 500 things or whatever. Imagine it was all done. You would feel amazing. And then what? What would happen is that maybe you go and have a picnic for the afternoon or whatever, go for a stroll. But within a few hours, you’re gonna be fizzing with energy with all these new things that you would start to want to do. So there’s always more. Life is finite. You’re never gonna get it all done. And so this idea that at some stage you’re going to do it all and get on top of it somehow, or clear the decks and then it’s gonna be fine and it’s gonna be calm. It’s not gonna happen. It’s not ever gonna happen. So if you want that sense of calm or you know, not feeling overwhelmed, it’s not going to come from more efficiency. It’s not gonna come from just getting more stuff done. I think it comes from a different place.

Isabel Berwick
So thinking about mortality, which I think is Oliver Burkeman’s . . . 

Tim Harford
Yeah, he loves to think about his own mortality . . . 

Isabel Berwick
(Laughter) So actually getting quite deep can help us with what our priorities should be.

Tim Harford
Or just thinking about there are only so many hours in a day, it’s the cliché, right? There’s only so much you can get done. And I think if you’re realistic about your expectations and you’re not trying to do everything all the time and keep everybody happy and ask too much of yourself, then that helps you to feel less overwhelmed. So that’s part of it. Another thing I think that helps you feel less overwhelmed is just feeling that you’re making the right decisions about how to prioritise your time. The funny thing is when you’re under massive deadline pressure, when everything is kind of going crazy, that is actually when a lot of people feel strangely calm. They don’t feel super stressed because they’re working very, very hard on something they know is important and they’ve just gotta get it done. And at that moment — and journalists know this feeling — actually it feels kinda good. It’s sort of exciting, but it doesn’t produce this tremendous anxiety. What produces tremendous anxiety is this kind of feeling that you’re not really sure what you should be doing. There’s a load of stuff you could be doing. You haven’t really got it in front of you. You don’t have a clear picture. You haven’t really made the decisions. That’s where the anxiety comes from.

Isabel Berwick
So essentially, when one’s in a flow state, you know, of deep work, doing very top, focused on something that’s . . . that is productive in itself, whatever we’re doing.

Tim Harford
It’s enormously productive. And I think we don’t spend enough time thinking about when we’re in those flow states. I mean, they can’t be summoned on command, I know, but what are the precursors, what are the foundations for getting into that kind of state and not being constantly distracted? I think another thing that’s worth just bearing in mind is the way a lot of people use their calendar. Calendar is one system that we all use or most people use that helps us feel, oh we know what’s going on. You’re not constantly trying to remember, like, where am I supposed to be, what am I committed to do? It’s all in the calendar. That only works for certain kinds of appointments. You can’t put everything in the calendar. That doesn’t . . . It just doesn’t work. But if we can have other ways of keeping track of what we have to do, what our projects are, what our goals are that we trust as much as we trust our calendar, and then we can kinda let go and not constantly be thinking about all the things we have to do all the time. That, I think, is a good place to be. I write stuff down. There are loads of different systems, but fundamentally, write stuff down where you trust you’re going to find it. It’s surprising how often I will sit down at my desk or sit down at a café and go, I don’t know what I’m I supposed to be doing; open my notebook, look at my list and go, oh yeah, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. And then you do it because I’ve just not been worrying about it. I’ve not been thinking about it.

Isabel Berwick
Interesting. I wanted to make a point about maybe this is gonna be a tenuous link, but you know, so many people listen . . . 

Tim Harford
No, we love tenuous links (Isabel laughs). I’m a newspaper columnist. I’m all about the tenuous links.

Isabel Berwick
Shhh, don’t give away our secrets. So many people will be working very long hours in what are often called greedy jobs, you know, professional jobs. And then in the UK at least, our productivity rates nationally are stagnant. You know, are we inefficient or is there any link between personal and national productivity? I find this a really fascinating conundrum.

Tim Harford
I find it fascinating as well. Arithmetically, there must be a link, right? Because national productivity is just all our personal productivity all added up. I mean, most economists would say that the national productivity has to do with things like education levels and infrastructure and appropriate regulation, and all of that sort of good stuff. And so, apart from maybe the education point, maybe less connected with the kinds of things that we’ve been discussing. But obviously, if you are able to get more done in a shorter space of time and then go and relax, if we could all do that, I think the nation would be more productive.

I think there is one connection I would make. The new technologies we’ve had, really over the last 30 years or so — it’s not just the smartphone era — mean that, so managers aren’t doing their own typing. They didn’t used to do their own typing. They used to have somebody who could actually type doing their typing. Now they’re doing the typing, and they’re maybe not very good typists. You have people who are not very good at PowerPoint making PowerPoint slides. Previously, those slides would have been handed over to the graphics department. We were all doing our own expenses. Previously, you would have had an assistant who actually knows how the expense system works, who’d have done all of that. So, there’s this tendency towards generalisation. And Adam Smith, the great economist, told us that specialisation is the foundation of productivity. And I think that this tendency for even very senior and very highly skilled people to kind of do a little bit of everything, including a lot of stuff they’re not very good at, that’s been enabled by technology. I suspect that is one reason why all of these digital technologies haven’t improved productivity as much as we want.

Isabel Berwick
And do you think AI and all the stuff that’s coming in now is gonna accelerate our productivity?

Tim Harford
So the latest data is that in the right circumstances, it can really help. So that for example they’ve given ChatGPT, or something like ChatGPT, to workers who are in a customer service centre. So you know your customer phones up or customer texts in with a live chat and they’ve got a problem. And while the service assistant is trying to solve the customer’s problem and deal with the angry customer, ChatGPT is saying, what about this? You could say this, you could send them this text. And they might edit it or they might just take it. So that study suggests that it provides a pretty decent boost to productivity. So about, I think that’s about 20 per cent boost to productivity, which is worth having. But also interestingly, it helps the least productive agents most. So the people who are not actually that skilled, they’re getting a big boost from the chatbots. The people who are already good at their jobs, they don’t really get much. It’s like giving a London cabbie a satnav. I mean, a London cabbie doesn’t really need a satnav. He or she already knows where they’re going. So that’s intriguing. I think it’s too early to say, but if that’s true, it suggests that the chatbots might actually be helping the less skilled people more, which would potentially compress wage inequality. I see so many ways for this to go very badly pear-shaped, but I don’t think we should assume it’s gonna be a disaster. It might not be.

Isabel Berwick
Let’s end on a positive note.

Tim Harford
Yeah, let’s do that.

Isabel Berwick
Thank you so much, Tim.

Tim Harford
It’s my pleasure.

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Isabel Berwick
From talking to Tim, it’s clear that efficient people like him make productivity work for them. So they filter emails right away. They address the vital ones first. And we can do simple things like take social media apps off our phones and leave those phones outside our bedrooms at night. It was fascinating to talk to Tim about our children. You know, we can do better. How many of us have so often looked at our phones rather than looking at our children when we’re talking to them? I know I’ve done it hundreds of times. Kids, I’m sorry. And I hadn’t heard anything like Tim’s analysis of our own inefficiency around tech before. You know, all those hours we now have to spend doing our own typing and presentation, so perhaps AI is gonna help the less efficient of us in unexpected ways.

My thanks to Tim Harford for this episode. If you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And please do get in touch. I’m isabel.berwick@FT.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you’re an FT subscriber, please sign up for the Working It newsletter. We’ve got the best workplace and management stories from across the FT and my new office therapy advice column. Sign up at FT.com/newsletters. This episode of Working It was produced by Audrey Tinline. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa, with mix from Jake Fielding. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.

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