How to be more productive: the answer is NOT motivation

You have a goal. Perhaps for yourself, perhaps for a team you lead. And you’re not getting there. You think, “I just gotta get motivated.” Or “I gotta motivate my team.”

I thought the same thing. I ran an experiment with my colleagues and found out that you can get a lot of work done whether you are motivated or not.

I’m deeply motivated to be a high achiever. Yet, I don’t seem to get much done. What I get done is usually late and half of what I promised. I’m always saying, “What I want to have done is not what I want to do.”

At least that’s how it used to be. Once I faced this fact about myself, I started exploring ways to change. One of the many things I’ve been doing is called GoGoDone. It’s an adventure with my colleague Avraham Byers that currently lives in an online community of Seth Godin’s.

At the core of GoGoDone are “productivity sessions.” It’s a digital meet up that uses accountability, the sense of community from a shared experience of taking a Seth Godin course and the structure of Pomodoros along with a few of my own secret ingredients to help us all get work done. We do it for 90 minutes. AND IT WORKS!

This process worked so well for me in the digital world that I decided to take a leap and give it a spin in the corporate world.

I work in the head office of a large chain of physical therapy clinics. I found myself some guinea pigs from various departments and leapt! Same format except they’d work on one goal for four weeks and our productivity sessions would be together in a conference room.

Let’s start with how I failed.

A few of my first invitees declined. The most common reasons were not having the kind of task that required a sustained 90 minutes (clinicians) and not having a schedule that easily allows for a 90-minute work block (customer service). Luckily, no one had a boss that wouldn’t let them. Mostly because I didn’t ask any of their bosses. That brings us to my next failure.

I fell prey to the toughest of corporate challenges — communication. I thought that since all they were doing was working in a different room, it was no big deal. Interestingly, my participants all felt the same way and said nothing to their bosses.

Then at different times, all of the relevant bosses walked by Conference Room 1 seeing what looked like an interdepartmental meeting that they knew nothing about. Oops. There was a lot of explaining and apologizing involved in this pilot. I had to manage some serious shame for screwing that one up royally.

On to the successes.

Whew! Now that I have that off my chest, let’s smooth over the wounds with where I succeeded. We can keep this to a few bullet points:

• Having an introductory session to work on proper goal setting and time management
• Removing ourselves to our own private uber-productive world of Conference Room 1
• Taking the five-minute breaks with fun or thoughtful discussion questions to build community AND have a little fun
• Tracking on a “scoreboard”

Inserting victory dance here:

Yes, I dance just like this…

The surprising conclusions

In an attempt to be a better experimenter and data nerd, I did a pre- and post- survey. It’s not scientific and I included my own responses in the data so it doesn’t prove anything in nerd-world. It’s enough for me though. Enough for me to write the title of this post the way I did and to plan for more groups and more data.

Here is an excerpt of the results and my conclusions as submitted to the powers that be:

The key here is that it isn’t all about motivation. Everyone felt better about their progress and procrastinated less but the comparative movement in motivation was mild.

Changing your environment and behavior will make you more productive even when you don’t feel motivated.

This is so important when we have tasks that need to be done that we don’t really enjoy doing or frankly could care less about.

My recommendations for my organization are as follows:

• Determine how much time you’d like each employee to spend on project work — the important, innovative stuff that doesn’t have a deadline.
• Based on the characteristics of your staff and their goals, make a conscious decision about whether you want teams of all one department or of different departments. Make a conscious decision about how long to run the groups. Often a deadline helps keep the fires lit.
• Always have a leader; a coordinator to run productivity sessions — either a team lead for a group that meets regularly or you could also have open drop-in sessions. (This is great low-stakes training for prospective new leaders.)
• Don’t leave out the five-minute breaks. That’s where sharing and community building happen.
• Before every Pomodoro, have each member say in a sentence what they’re working on. After, have them report how it went. Connection and understanding are built here.

So what’s your take? Have you run any experiments at work or do you have any practices that keep you productive? I’d love to hear about them (full disclosure — I might try and copy them!). Got any suggestions for my next experiment?

I’d love to hear all about it in the comments!