Imagine you have the opportunity to sit down for a coffee with Google’s Executive Productivity advisor — the top productivity expert at Google.
You have the chance to ask about her productivity routines and habits. What questions would you ask? What productivity secrets would you want to uncover?
Dr Amantha Imber recently interviewed Laura Mae Martin, Google’s Executive Productivity Advisor on her podcast “How I work!”
Below are my notes on the most valuable advice from the podcast, broken down into 4 sections:
- Daily planning — How Laura sets up her day for success
- Weekly planning — Her process for creating weekly plans
- Tips for working from home, especially during the pandemic
- Email workflows — how Laura manages her email
#1. Daily planning — How does Laura sets up her day for success?
Laura has a daily plan template which she goes through and fills it in.
You can download the template here.
She works through her template the night before, to be ready for the upcoming day.
Here are the steps she follows:
1.
First, she identifies the top 3 priorities for the next day, by asking the question: “What does a successful day look like?”
Out of the 3 priorities, she selects the most important task and puts this on top. This is her daily highlight as Jake Knapp, another Googler would say. Until this first thing is finished, everything else is a distraction.
2.
Then she adds some smaller to-dos. These are tasks that take 15 minutes or less, which you can fit in as you have time here and there. For example, if a meeting ends early, you can go to this list to select the email you want to send or the call you want to make.
3.
The next step is to time-block hour-by hour what you are going to work on. She considers this the most important part.
Planning out what you are going to work on and when makes a huge difference whether you will complete the tasks.
You should do a rough hour by hour plan, noting existing commitments like meetings and deciding on paper when you plan to work on your top 3 priorities. This makes it more likely you will do focused work on them.
4.
Finally, at the top of the page she has a note to remind herself to write something that she is grateful about.
Below is an example of the completed daily plan:
#2. Creating weekly plans
Do you have a long list of projects you want to complete or tasks you want to do? If you are like me, this list is ever growing.
And you keep saying to yourself, next week I will work on this project. But this time never comes.
Creating a weekly plan helps make progress on your most important projects, says Laura.
To make progress on her most important projects, Laura fills out a weekly template each week, answering these two questions:
1. What are my priorities for the week?
2. When do I plan to work on them?
Basically, if you want to complete a project, you need to decide what “completion” looks like and when you will work on it during the week.
Laura said that:
“Where people get stuck in productivity is listing everything they want to do, but never assigning the right place & time to do it.”
This quote resonated with me.
Below is an example of the Weekly plan template:
When making your weekly plan, you should also consider your weekly energy rythms. Find a natural rhythm you know you have, by thinking when you are most productive, and take advantage of that.
For example, on Monday mornings you can take advantage of high energy to schedule focused work on a demanding project. Then, if you have an important meeting on Tuesday morning, you can prepare on Monday afternoon.
Similarly, if you are travelling to meet with a client on Thursday afternoon, by having a high level overview of your week, you can ensure you prepare adequately on Wednesday.
Allocate other important work throughout the week, when you know you will have the energy to produce focused work.
The simplest way to uncover your natural energy rhythm, is to ask the question:
“What are you usually in the mood for, on a particular day or time?”
Finally, make sure to schedule time for your weekly review and to plan for next week. This is where the magic happens.
Below is an example of a weekly plan, taking into account natural energy rhythms:
#3. Tips for working from home
especially during the current Covid19 pandemic
There is a big difference between working from home occasionally, and being at home every single day without having a choice. This was the case when many employees had to work from home during the lockdown in spring 2020.
To remain productive, Laura says that you need to set boundaries, both mental and physical.
1.
First, she suggests to have a place where you always work.
- Put your laptop in one spot, whether it’s the home office or the kitched table. Pick one spot and stick with it. This helps with state dependent recall: every time you go to this spot, you associate the sights, smells and location with working, she says.
- If you keep switching spots, it’s harder for your brain to get into the mode of “this is where I work”
Also, have a space where you never work. This helps create mental boundaries, to be able to switch off in the evenings when you are watching TV or spending time with family.
2.
Second, you can create morning and evening rituals.
You should think of your day as a marathon, instead of sprints.
Thus, start your day without looking at your phone first thing in the morning, until the time you would have gone to work. Eat breakfast, spend some time with your kids and start your work with high energy.
In the evening, stop work at a set time and then don’t watch TV with the work laptop on.
3.
Finally, if you are a parent of a young child, you may have to adjust your work habits to accomodate some of your child’s schedules.
This means that you may have to work in sprints while your child is sleeping, if you don’t have babysitting available. You can share child responsibilities between you and your spouse, babysitting in turns while the other works.
To achieve this, you need to plan your days and week in advance, so that you can prioritize aggressively. Also, you may need to delegate some of the work or postpone it.
#4. Email workflows
How does someone who works at Google, the company that created Gmail, processes their email?
Having a chance to take an insider peak on how Laura manages her email is very interesting. Google employees are known to receive increased volumes of email, thus an efficient workflow is essential to remain productive.
As an executive productivity advisor, she probably shares the insight of how, many employees at the company, stay on top of their inbox and tasks.
Let’s take a step back first. I would like you to think about the last time you did laundry and then took out the clothes from the dryer. Smell the fresh scent of clothes coming out of the drier and feel how warm and soft they are.
- Did you take out one shirt, go put it in the drawer, then come back to take a sock out, then hang a shirt, one by one?
- Did you put back a wet pair of pants with the finished dried clothes, because it just came out of the washing machine?
- Did you fold the same shirt twice?
This is how most people do email.
Pick and work on one email, return to the inbox to read a notification, mark emails as unread, constantly working inefficiently and in a distracted mode.
Instead, when the drier is finished, most people take out all the clothes together, put them on the bed and then sort them in piles:
- t-shirts get folded and are placed in their drawers
- the socks are paired
- and finally we hang the shirts in the wardrobe
It’s better to batch process your laundry — and your email:
Use a batching workflow for email:
Laura proposes a similar batching workflow for email. This workflow separates the processing and the acting on email.
She suggests to sort all your inbox emails as a separate activity and get to zero.
Then, you can act on your emails separately, by doing focused work, without being distracted by new email coming into the inbox.
The benefit of this approach is that you avoid losing lots of energy by touching the same email multiple times.
Here is her daily workflow regarding email:
For Processing email:
Open inbox in the morning. Get to inbox zero by going through each email that is in her inbox using “Auto Advance”, to force you to go to the next email without going back into the main inbox. She processes all emails sequentially until she gets to Inbox zero.
There are 3 folders you can put each email in. This is achieved using Tags in Gmail:
1. To Do > this is something you need to do
2. To Read > this is material you want to read later, like industry reports, that are not time critical
3. Waiting > things to follow up on but that are not directly your action
All other email that does not fit into the above categories is either deleted or archived.
For Acting on email:
She suggests to batch email work, based on your energy levels.
In the prime morning hours, you can concentrate on the ToDo folder, working with focus for a couple of hours through the ToDos, without looking at the inbox.
In mid-afternoon, after lunch when the energy is low, you can go through Read and consume those industry articles you wanted to read
At the end of the day:
- you can go through the waiting list and follow up on pendings on anything that is coming up with a deadline
- Go through inbox and get to inbox zero again.
Throughout the day, she still checks her inbox but tries not to keep it open while she works with focus
In summary, her two rules for email are:
- Treat it like laundry
- Close it 1–2 times a day and work with focus.
So here you have it. This was a very interesting interview between Laura Mae Martin, executive productivity advisor at Google, and Dr Amantha Imber.
I particularly enjoyed the discussions on:
- setting up your day for success
- creating weekly plans
- working from home tips and
- email management
In particular, the quote that resonated with me the most was :
“where people get stuck with productivity is listing everything they want to do, but never assigning the right place and time to do them…”
I am a big fan of timeblocking and creating weekly plans. This interview reinforced for me to keep up with this habit and be more intentional.
What about you? Which of the workflows discussed had the most impact for you?
You can also watch a narrated and animated video of this article:
Resources:
- Advice for mastering your email from Laura Mae Martin:
https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/master-your-email/
2. Make “work from home” work from you:
https://www.blog.google/inside-google/googlers/make-work-from-home-work-for-you/
