SDS 346: My Top 5 Productivity Hacks

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast everybody, super excited to have you back here on the show. If you’ve been following along with episodes you will remember that we have been discussing the history of data science and we’ve done three out of five episodes in that series so far. And today we’re going to take a short break from the history of data science and talk about something equally as important, productivity. In this episode I’ll give you my top five hacks or tips on how I get the most out of my day. 

But before we get started I wanted to announce in case you have missed it at that this year we’re going to be running our conference DataScienceGO in Europe as well as in the US. So for those of you who are in Europe and you’ve wanted to come to DataScienceGO US and you’ve been missing it for the past three years, then this is your opportunity. The event is running on the 15th, 16th, and 17th of May. 

It’s a weekend is happening in Berlin and you can get your tickets already today at datasciencego.com. Right now they’re on super early bird special that won’t last for long. And also we have very limited availability, so very first event we want to make it quite intimate. So make sure to jump on board. I will be there. Hadelin will be there. Jose Quesada will be there and lots of very interesting other speakers will be coming to join us. And I can’t wait to see you at DataScienceGO into Europe, again it’s 15th, 16th, 17th May, tickets at datasciencego.com. 

And now let’s proceed to today’s episode. So what is it all about? Well today we are talking about productivity hacks and why is this topic relevant? Well, what I found recently is that since December I’ve been working on some courses on very in depth courses on Tableau specifically. So Tableau is a visualization tool if you haven’t used it. Fascinating, one of my favorite data science tools. And I decided to create some new courses for Tableau. So the current course has just been released. It’s over 30 hours long and it compiles the whole journey of Tableau together. So it really helps prepare people for certification. 

But the point is not about the course though, the point is about the fact that creating this 30 hour long course or the past couple of months made me or required me to put in extra time. So basically I’m already running SuperDataScience and DataScienceGO as well as some of other projects and working on some things here and there. But in addition to that, I had to allocate out of nowhere, I had to come up with maybe around 20 hours, at least 20 hours per week of extra time to put into this course, probably more. And that is a huge challenge. 

If you’re already doing all your work, imagine you’re doing all your work at work and then somebody comes along and says, “Well now you have to allocate an extra, come up with 20 hours a week extra to put into your work.”
And the last thing you want to do is you don’t want to sacrifice your personal time, family time, fitness time, and all these other times. And of course had to dip into that a little bit. 

But at the same time I had to find ways to be productive and at the same time still stay sane not go crazy. And so this is where I noticed the things that I was doing. What were the top five things I was doing that were helping me be super productive and get all this stuff done. And that’s why I want to share them with you today in case maybe one or two or a couple of these tips will be helpful for you. So here we go. My top five productivity tips. 

Tip number one, start your week early. Start on a Sunday afternoon. Even if you spend two to three hours, even if you spend one hour on a Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening, maybe with a glass of wine or just a cup of tea, just planning out your day. What are you going to do on Monday? What are the top tasks that you’re going to focus on? Maybe already look into it, read a little bit about it. 

And that way when you get to work on Monday or for instance, you might be planning this out not for your work, but for your hobby, for how you’re learning data science or machine learning or AI.
And then when you start that, like for instance, you’re doing that before work on a Monday, you’ll already have a head start. You won’t be wasting that time trying to realize what do I do? 

And don’t just plan for Monday, try to plan on Sunday plan your whole week ahead. Have a vision for your week. What do you want to accomplish in the upcoming week? What are going to be your most important things you’re going to be working on? Maybe top three things and in that order. And give them a priority so you know on Monday when you get to work, this is what you’d be focusing on and also will help you plan out the future days. So tip number one is start your week early. That one hour or two hours invested on Sunday will save you half a day on Monday or give you a huge boost in productivity in the following week. 

Number two, a morning, hour or focus hour. So have a morning hour. First thing when you get to work, if you want to work on your own projects or on data science learning, then get to work earlier, an extra hour earlier. Or if you want to work on work stuff, then get to work on time. But have that first hour when you are being proactive and not reactive. So what this means is don’t even open your inbox for sure, no email the first hour, no WhatsApp, no messages, no Facebook messenger, no work messenger, no incoming messages at you. No phone calls, nothing. 

That first hour should be completely blocked out when you have no external input from the outside world. And this includes when you wake up, don’t look at your phone before you get to work, don’t do anything, absolutely anything that will give you external input. Because as soon as you get a little bit, your mind is fresh, right? Your mind is empty.
As soon as you let somebody put something in there, it instantly takes that and your mind jumps at it and starts processing, analyzing it and thinking what it can do with it. 

And so you’re effectively giving control of your mind to somebody else, the first message you read or first email you looked at. So make sure to for that first hour, not have any input externally and start working on what’s important. Just spend one hour. We can all find one hour at the start of our day to focus on, what do we need to focus on? Well, the most important task. In Matt Mochary’s book, The Great CEO Within, he calls this the top goal. 

So make sure to have a top goal in mind and focus on that in the first hour. And that way you can get that thing done.
And once you do it for a few times, you do it for a week or two weeks, you’ll get so excited. Like today morning I woke up and I was thinking, “Oh, what am I going to do?” I already knew what my top goal was because you will see from tip four, you need to know in advance. I already knew what my top goal was, but I was like thinking, “Oh, it’d be so cool to have this other thing as my top goal because then I know I’m going to get my top goal done.” You’re super excited about your top goal because you get into the habit of getting it done. It doesn’t mean you have to complete it. You get massive progress done in that first hour. So make sure to be proactive in your first hour, to focus on your top goal because being reactive will drain your focus. So that’s tip number two a morning, hour or focus hour and top goal. 

Tip number three is end your day with an unfinished task. This sounds a bit counter-intuitive. Why would you end your day if you haven’t finished a task? Well, it’s actually to help your productivity the next day. Because it’s much easier to get into something you’re already working on. In the morning it will be much easier to get into something you’re already working on. Otherwise, if you finish a task and you feel like a winner and a hero, you completed it, you crushed the day, you get back home, amazing. But then the next day it’s so hard to build that momentum to start the next big thing. 

You always want to start the thing you’re going to be working on tomorrow. You want it already in progress or you want it at least started on the day before. So if you really need to finish a task, finish it, no problem. But then before you go home, start the next one. Make sure you have something in progress. So that gap between the days, that whole evening time, it will get you out of your momentum. 

And the way to combat that, the way to preserve that focus when you get there in the morning is to don’t match the end of your task to the end of your day. Mismatch them, that way even though you’re having a break, an evening and so on, you know when you get back to work, you have something to jump straight into it. And then you can finish it in the morning or during the day and then move on to the next day. So always try to avoid finishing a task by the end of the day, or at least have a task that you’ve started on, you’ll continue the following day. That was tip number three. 

Tip number four. Plan your day the night before. Similar to how we talked about planning the week on a Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening. Plan every single day on the night before. Why? Well this is important, it goes hand in hand with your top goal or your morning hour. Because if you don’t have a plan from the evening of what your top goal is, what are you going to be working on in that morning hour, then you will be reactive. You will be searching for something to do and that’s going to defeat the purpose of your morning hour. 

You don’t want to use that morning hour to be searching, you want to use it to be productive.
It literally takes 15 minutes to sit down in the evening, the night before, maybe after dinner, maybe after putting the kids to bed. Just sit down and think, “What am I going to focus on? What is my top goal? If I could get one thing done tomorrow, only one thing, what absolutely has to be done? What do I have to make massive progress on?” And that will be a top goal. Put it in, write it down. Make sure you know what you’re going to be starting working on in the following day. 

And that’s also a good thing because it’ll help your mind start thinking about it. You’ll be sleeping, we don’t know if it’s true or not, but your brain can come up with ideas at night. Definitely it’s true because people come up with ideas at night. The periodic system of elements was invented while Mendeleev was asleep, right? So things like that. But basically your mind will start working. And in the morning you might have great ideas. Well, even if you don’t, at least you’ll be in the right mindset, you’ll know what you need to be doing. You won’t have this uncertainty. And that was tip number four. Plan your day the night before. 

And tip number five, mix it up. So there’ll be times during your day when you will start feeling mental fatigue. Absolutely everybody goes through this. And for me, for instance, it’s usually between 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM local time. And there is no point pushing it during that time. You can still push it and you can still get things done. But ultimately you will be probably 50 or 70% less productive than you are in your peak times. So be honest with yourself and use this low productivity time to do other things. 

For instance, if you’re at home, if you’re working from home, do some housework or go for a walk or go for a jog. Or for instance if you’re in the office, you can go to have a coffee break there. A great time to have a nap. My easiest time to have a nap is between 2:00 and 4:00 PM.
But again, if you’re an office, you can’t do that. Maybe go for a walk or you can maybe plan your lunch break for that specific time. 

By the way, for you, this time might be very different and I’ll recommend the book at the end of this episode on how to understand that time for you. But whatever this time is for you, plan some other activities. If you have to be in front of the computer, if there’s no way around it then plan some low cognitive load tasks. So tasks that you don’t have to focus on as much on or don’t have to have as much energy to do. And that way you still will get them done, but at least you’re using up your low productive time to get them done. 

So bear in mind, observe that about yourself. When is your lowest and highest productive time and use it appropriately. This is probably one of the biggest tricks that you can get in one hour of high productive time, which for me is very early in the morning or between seven to 11:00 PM in the evening. And at some other times of the day, I have very productive time. In one hour of that very productive time, you can get three or four times as much done as in the average hour throughout your day. So if you know those, you can really get more hours from your day of productivity, than you have in a normal day. So tip number five was mix it up. 

And there we go. Those are our five tips. So to recap, number one start your week early. Number two, have a morning hour or focus hour where you focus on your top goal. Number three is end your day with an unfinished task. Number four, plan your day, the night before, and number five, mix it up. Understand your high and low productive times throughout the day. A great book I can recommend specifically on point number five of understanding your fluctuations and focus and energy, is called The Productivity Project where Chris Bailey breaks productivity down into three components, time, energy, and focus. Really interesting book. I read it in 2015 and completely changed my life. I understood much better how I function, highly recommend to everybody. 

So there we go. Top five productivity tips. Hope some of these will help you in your career and help you get the most out of your day. And I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.