Managing productivity and feeling productive

00:00 Hello and welcome to Perspective. This is a show by founders of digital creative agencies giving our perspective on starting and running our own companies. Their aim is to provide some useful advice and inspiration to others as well as learn from each other and others we get to come talk on the show. This is our 23rd episode. My name is John Dark. I'm a director at Every Interaction.

00:18 Back with me again today we've got Dan Ghent from Lighthouse London. Hello, Dan. Hey, John. How's it going? All right. Thank you. How are you? I'm not too bad. I'm reeling from the snap election and I'm thinking back to our Brexit episodes and I'm wondering if we were overly positive. I feel like we were.

00:43 I can't bring myself to listen back. But yeah, other than that, I'm doing well. Yeah. Yeah. I'm worried and a little bit confused about the whole thing. Good. Let's not podcast about it then.

00:57 I feel I'll very quickly get out of my depth if we try that. Been a while since we recorded. I take it you've been very busy. Absolutely. Can't remember what on, but I suppose today's episodes might reveal the methods by which I tried to be busy or tried not to be busy, depending on your perspective.

01:19 Yeah. So today we're hoping to talk about productivity as a business owner. So what do we mean by that? I guess running a business, there's a lot to do and a lot of balls to keep in the air, to keep juggling and to try and feel like you're being productive as you're progressing with your business and with your daily work. And I guess we just wanted to talk about how we manage that and how that's changed with us through our businesses as they've grown to where they are today.

01:59 Yeah, it's so different from a day to day job. I mean, not day to day job, a full time job where you're working for someone else. The kind of entire meaning of productivity changes, I think, as you try to run your own business. And it's definitely something that occupies my mind a lot, like as if there's a feeling that if I could achieve perfect productivity, then everything would be great. And any day that I feel I'm not achieving perfect productivity, especially when someone's not directly paying you, it just feels like, well, why am I sitting here at this desk at all? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, when you're being employed by someone else, you're hired generally to do a very specific thing. And all you have to do is be focused on doing that one major role. As a founder of a company, you tend to have to wear a lot of different hats. And those hats change in size and shape and priority as your business grows. And as you hire different people, do different things along the way. When you're hired by another company, there's so much stuff that you are purposely shielded from. They hire lots of people to do very specific things, lots of mundane day-to-day running the business responsibilities that you are shielded from by them hiring these people. So when you come to start your own business, you suddenly have to do all of this stuff on your own or with co-founders. And quite frankly, there's a lot to do as well as actually getting the work done. Yeah, I feel at the beginning, I think it's a problem that gets worse the more you know, right? So at the beginning of starting out with Lighthouse, as you're saying there, there's loads of different roles you've got to play. But I think at the beginning, I just ignored a lot of those roles. Me too. I was like, no, my business is going to be different. It's not going to require some of these roles that I don't attribute any value to.

04:30 I'm going to be a designer till I die. Yeah, absolutely. And basically, people are going to look at the design and that is the sales process. They will just want to hire me. And I think like as you go along and you learn more about all the things you need to do, and you kind of get into running a business. So you start actually actively seeking out information on how best to run businesses that you that that suddenly the entire weight of all the stuff you've got to do hits you.

05:03 And I think you worry about it way more. I think at the beginning, I was just naive, I probably way more productive from a, you know, output point of view, like actually creating things than I am now. But I probably wasn't that productive in terms of the intangibles of running a business, you know? Yeah, exactly. And even if you are aware of all the things that need to be done, you can't do it all. There's just not enough time in the day. And you've got to focus on prioritise. When people start businesses, it's usually just themselves or themselves and one or two other co-founders, most common scenario. And everyone is really quite focused on production.

05:51 They're not doing a lot of the other things that's quite honestly, they probably need to worry about at that stage, they really just need to worry about getting your business in and making sure they do a really good job of it so that they get more new business. And that in turn will lead to some growth. I think it's when the growth starts happening, and you start hiring some other people that things start to get a little bit more complicated. Yeah, absolutely. I suppose the things I wish I'd done a bit differently that I probably do now is, and this is something I think you might have said to me way back when, was the idea of being aware of all those different roles you require and almost saying, "Okay, fine. So I am sitting across HR, marketing, sales, you know, all different roles in business is me." If you're aware of that, then you can at least see the things you should be doing. And this is what I mean by getting worse as you learn more, seeing the things you should be doing but aren't. And I think with a lot of those things, like even from a finance point of view, you're not going to spend a lot of your time looking at the numbers, probably not as much as you should. You need to be aware of it. And I think if I just put in place like literally a piece of software, so I think we did with finance, so we did get free agent or something like that in place so that right from the off, there wasn't a load of bad stuff to undo because I think from a productivity point of view, that's a killer, that you come to the point where you realize you need something but the business just has ignored being set up for it.

07:47 So from a sales point of view, it's like just have a like CRM really early on. Like you don't need to do anything with it, but if you're capturing all of that data and just if all your contacts are in one place and it has records of all the conversations you had with those people, you might never look at it, but the day that it comes to say, "Hey, we're going to do some sales now. Let's look at our clients." It's there, right? And you're not going, "Ah, well, to do that, I'm going to have to go back through my Gmail history." And let's go and say months. So then you actually become even more unproductive because you put off stepping up that side of things, if that makes sense. So it's almost like having just doing a tiny bit in each area and then recognizing that you're going to be able to-- that you're going to ignore it now. Like you're not going to think about that side of the business. You haven't got time. When you're three people, you don't need a dedicated person doing HR full time. No, it's just not necessary or even finance or maybe even new business. It's about delegating. I mean, it's important to recognize you need to do something in each of those areas. It's just about trying to figure out how much in order to support what you are today and give you the growth that you're looking for. Yeah. And just make sure that when you come to scaling, there's not a load of stuff to unpick. You haven't like run an entire side of the business on a few scraps of paper that should have been in a spreadsheet.

09:30 So you don't have to like do lots of work to get back to a place where you can start to expand that side of the business. Yeah, I'm terrible with names of things such as books, but there's that famous business book I've completely forgotten the name of and I'm sure we've referred to many times that talks about the sort of roles and the hats and writing the rule book essentially for each one of the roles as you do it. So that when you come to hire for that, there's a sort of training manual in place already. Yes. And then you move on to the next job in the stack once you hire for that role and you do the same process again and you slowly move your way up the ladder and document everything you're doing in order to perform the actions of that role until it's big enough to hire someone to do it full time. Yeah, absolutely. You're kind of on a mission to continually make yourself like redundant basically. Yes, but never actually succeeding in doing so.

10:32 Well, hopefully not. Unless you become whatever, if redundant is falling out the bottom of a company, whatever like flying off the top is. That's a model that I think can work.

10:49 The Richard Branson model. Yeah, I suppose so. If the business at the end doesn't need you, that's not necessarily a bad thing assuming you still own the business.

11:02 Yeah, well, that's great. And that's a lot of people's ambition, right? To be able to get to a position like that where they effectively don't need to do much work but can bring in the money because they've done the hard work to get the business to where it is. I also think it's actually simultaneously a sign of a healthy business if it's not reliant on a person. It means that those roles are well defined, that you know how to easily find people to fill them, and that those people are successful there. It's a symptom. Being able to do that as well as being good for the founder is also actually a sign of a business that's doing well.

11:51 Yeah, I agree. So what about personal productivity though? If that's kind of productivity in terms of how it changes as you go along, like having to do all this stuff and then slowly becoming more and more general, how do you manage stuff you've got to do each day? That is in a state of constant flux.

12:12 I don't have a system I think that's perfect by any means, but I use a lot of different tools and a lot of different things to try and help me remember all the things that I need to do and make sure that they get done. So a lot of project-based tasks that need to be seen and collaborative, we keep in Trillo. So for each project we keep a board with all the sort of active tasks where we can have conversations around those and keep people updated on what's going on. As a team to keep a general distributed communal list of tasks and statuses of things as a project progresses.

12:58 And that's where your tasks all live in there as well? Some, yeah, but it's more where I document the tasks that I'm, of the people I'm managing. And give feedback on the work that needs to be done or is being done.

13:13 Got you. So quite often I'll create a project board for a piece of work up front based on, usually at the beginning of a project, once we've won it as part of the pitching process, we would usually do a sort of similar exercise, usually in a spreadsheet to start with where we document the stories of a project. And then those stories might form the initial sort of tasks that you need to do. And then that might populate the initial Trello board. And then you would go into each column, try and break down the tasks at another granular level and start assigning responsibilities. Got you. Where does your, I know, like a catch up with this member of staff or remember to talk to HMRC about this, that and the other.

14:01 Well, thankfully I will learn Neil for all the HMRC stuff. He's got the finance out in the business. Right, got you. I've got a few others, but I am a massive advocate of using my calendar a lot.

14:16 Okay. I really, really use my calendar and I use it quite religiously to block out time for meetings and calls and reminders and things. If I have a scheduled call with someone, it goes in the calendar. Everyone's invited. All the details are there, all the dialing. So I don't need to go anywhere else. I can look at my calendar for the day and see what's ahead and know what time I have to be productive in doing other things and what time I need. It's where I scheduled all my communication time, essentially. If I need to be in a meeting, how do I get there? What's the travel time? What calls do I need to be on? What standups? What conferences? All sorts of things like that, wherever I'm doing communication or away from the desk time, it's in there.

15:02 I even put sleep in my calendar. I'm not rigorous about it. Really? Yeah. I've got quite a few different calendars for different things. With my personal calendar in particular, I put sleep because I need a lot of sleep. I need my eight hours a day.

15:18 I was going to say, I mean, eight hours a day, yes, fine. But if I've got a calendar for sleep, are you scheduling naps? No. I don't do naps. I just use my eight hours in a week and more at the weekends.

15:32 I just put it in there so that I know nothing is ever going to interrupt with it. Nothing can overlap with it. There will be a conflict if I put anything in there when I'm supposed to be sleeping.

15:44 I've also got an alert timer set up so that at quarter past 10, I get my calendar alarm from my calendar going, oh, it's time to get ready to go to bed. Whatever you're doing right now.

15:59 Like it. Stop doing it soon and get ready to go to bed because you need to be sleeping soon. And how excellent to be able to take that off your to-do list. Exactly. That works well for me in terms of those activities. I used to-do lists, quite a lot for you to-do lists, apps. I'm an advocate of using different apps for different purposes. So, for example, I run a couple of Twitter accounts and I got a couple of Twitter clients on my phone. Instead of switching accounts within the apps, which is usually a real pain in the ass to do, I just have a different app installed running that particular Twitter account.

16:37 Okay. Yeah. I do the same thing with to-do lists. So I've got a personal to-do list, which has got loads of things I do, which is mostly sort of my home and weekend tasks around the house and fixing things and helping my partner with her business and all sorts of other sort of domestic duties.

16:57 I keep in one app and in another app, I just recently switched to trying to-do lists. I put business-related things, which I categorize by project.

17:08 Okay. And I try to put a date on each of those and then you've got this sort of handy today view of other tasks of things that you need to do today. And some of those might be relating to calendar entries, but often they're more sort of things that I need to get done that day to make sure I'm being productive, I guess.

17:27 And did you come up with this all by yourself or are you one of the people that reads up on how to be productive? Not really. I don't really read up on that sort of thing. I'm not a proponent of picking up somebody else's philosophy and trying to apply it to my productivity in life. I don't think anyone does that religiously anyway. They just take bits and sort of customize it.

17:52 Oh, I don't know. I think there's some productivity junkies out there. Okay. Yeah. I'm definitely not one of those. I borrow from things I've heard people talk about.

18:02 Yeah. I never study these things in depth and follow them religiously. That's just, I'm not that kind of guy. Like if I'm cooking, if I got a recipe book, I'll like scan the recipe at the beginning and then make it up as I go and hung off to that based on when I remembered for my scan improvise.

18:18 Excellent. I think I can do it better and I don't like following the rules. Right. I like it. And I try to apply the same philosophy to my task management and a little bit from here, a little bit from there, lots of different things for different purposes. Everything has a sort of focus and I go to certain places to do certain things. And as a system, as a whole, it sort of works for me, I guess.

18:45 You never forget to go to sleep for a start. Yeah. I mean, so I quite like the idea of having a system and then there's a lot of systems out there. You're getting things done, have you heard of that?

18:59 Yeah. Oh yeah. I've heard people talk a lot about that. Yeah, absolutely. But my problem with a lot of these things is they're so easy to like, they all proclaim perfection in productivity, right? So you get these medium posts where you get, you know, founder of XYZ startup or this person taking you through their like morning routine and things like that. And it's the same as when people release code snippets on blogs, you know, it's like not realistic and coding. It's been kind of completely made beautiful for the situations in it's not something that ever happened in the real world because people just, well, maybe not out of my fingers, though.

19:50 It's like an unsolicited redesign on Dribble where someone has redesigned LinkedIn or IMDB or something, but completely forgot to include any advertising, which are the business models of his entire website. So that's nice, but that website wouldn't exist if it looked like that because there's no advertising in it. Absolutely. It's like this kind of, it's this fake version of reality. And you sort of, but you read all these, but people kind of latch onto it and say, oh, I'm going to try that method, you know, and they do it with their diets and stuff. I don't, you know, the people in the startup world trying to optimize themselves by fasting and all this sort of stuff that kind of they get on with.

20:38 Oh, like the Soylent thing where people just don't have time to eat, so they just have a shake instead. Completely. And people go absolutely mad for it. And the crazy thing to me is that most of these people, it's like the things that they're actually celebrated for are building a great software product, you know, and you just think, well, if you're going to take something from that person's life, try and work out how they did that. It really doesn't matter what they do when they wake up in the morning. If they read two chapters of a book, meditate, eat some Soylent, and then, and then one of the ones that very much know was, and then connect with their family as if that's kind of a choice that you can do that an hour after waking up. I mean, my family connects with me viscally at like 6am at the latest, you know, there's no option for me to go, oh, right, yeah, wait, I've got to meditate a bit before...

21:41 Hang on, family. Before I watch two hours of CBBs. But people get very into it and getting things done. And I think I kind of get wrapped up in that. Like, I think, oh, if I could just find the thing that would organize everything, because I, if I feel I'm productive, or I like, gets in the day and I haven't felt productive, like, that actually just puts me in the mood. I feel, I become like demotivators, feel like crap about everything. So I think I'm just searching for the feeling of productivity, because it's very hard to actually measure impacts, like, over days work, like, especially when you're running a company when it's like, well, today I had a pointless, seemingly pointless, you know, half an hour chat with an old friend who works for a different company, that in three months could turn into a quarter of next year's revenue, because they decided, you know, that's something I said then, you know, it was it was just a connection, but it's turned into some business, you know, versus, you know, head down writing blogs that no one cares about. It's like, you know, it's very hard to measure the actual outputs. And so I'm always looking for ways to at least trick myself into feeling productive. So as well as having the to do list, I think, for me, one thing that works is making sure there's like a done list. So somewhere you can look back on and go, those are all the things I did today. And they were all they were all interruptions, because you basically just get interrupted the entire time as a business owner, as far as I can tell, you know, all interruptions, they were all scrappy, none of it was like, Oh, I spent two hours doing what I used to do, you know, a nice bit of programming or something. And when it's all like that, it's very hard to actually go, what did I actually achieve today? I feel like, if you were like nothing felt worthy of timing, you know, I mean, nothing felt worthy of starting and stopping a clock on. But you need something to be like, well, I need something to say, stuff did happen today.

24:11 And, you know, here's what you spent your time on. I think that's also useful from then, even if you're not like, I agree with you, you've just got to come up with your own system. But you can't, you know, maybe getting things done will work for you. But I think just as long as nothing's going to give you perfect productivity. So as long as you have your own system, I think then just some way of just being aware of it, like how well is it working? How much are you getting done? Can you reduce those interruptions? To do that, you need to know how often you're getting interrupted. So again, it's about having trying to have some kind of data on what you're doing to then be able to improve that, probably as good as you as you're going to get like, I feel immense guilt when I'm not productive, but at the same time, how can you be productive all the time? You just can't, you know.

25:09 No, exactly. I've just remembered there's another bit of software I use, actually, I've got this little tracker thing on my computer called Rescue Time. Oh, yeah. You hear this? It's like a little background sniffer thing. It just records what your application is using and it sends, I've just got to set this in a weekly summary of things.

25:29 Looking at my past week, which I logged, 26 hours and six minutes of productive time, I had a productivity score of 74%. But that's based on what you told it, right? Because I used to use that and it was like, its problem is it's got no context, has it? It's kind of like...

25:54 Well, you have to give it context, right? So here we go. Top applications and websites. Four hours 50 in mail, three hours 23 in Slack.

26:05 So is four hours 50 in mail good or bad? I find that's productive for me. Yeah. I mean, when I'm... This is on my work computer only, for which I only use, you know, for work purposes at my desk in the office. And the only mail I'm dealing with there is client mail. It's like sending reports, replying to clients, and your business inquiries and general project communications back and forth.

26:35 Yeah. So that's very productive. That's tagged as a very productive task. Cool. What have you got down as unproductive? Slack is medium. Oh, I was in sketch for two hours last week and in design for an hour and a half.

26:50 Wow. And one hour, 10 minutes in Google Docs. It all sounds good. What do you count sleeping as? That doesn't get tracked in rescue time.

27:05 It could probably track that though. He hasn't moved in a while. I do track my sleep, but not in rescue time. Fine. Because I use apps to track my sleep because I feel it's very important to my productivity in general and at work. And yeah, I like to know that I am getting enough of it.

27:31 You're not going to do that. I was reading a few things off the guy, the Basecamp people. They were getting so into sleep. They were starting to talk about incentivizing their staff to sleep more. I kind of got it, but also thought it's a little bit scary to start telling people when they should be asleep or not.

27:56 Here we go. My unproductive time last week, YouTube. I spent 38 minutes on YouTube, apparently. Oh, man. I think that was work. I promise. I was looking up some videos to the project.

28:14 Are you just not tempted to do it on your phone? To hide it from rescue time? No, I try not to use my mobile at all and on my desk, actually.

28:30 Because it is distracting. I try to do everything through the computer. Nice. For some things, it's a little bit more limiting. So do you have email rules and things like that?

28:43 I will check. So these are other things you can read a ton of articles on. Check your emails twice a day. I've been guarded with my email time at times, but generally, I just always lapse back to jumping to an email as soon as I receive it.

28:59 Assuming I'm at my desk. If I'm not at my desk, then it can wait. I don't have push notifications or even manual automatic fetching on my working email on my personal device. I'll have to manually open and manually send and receive the app in order to get email into my work addresses on my personal phone.

29:24 Because I don't let that enter my life outside of work too much. I only have push notifications for a select few people allowed on any device.

29:39 I like it. But that being said, when I'm at my desk and I get a mail, I generally, whatever I'm doing, drop everything and go and read it, which is not the best thing to do.

29:53 That's a massive no-no. Trying to remain productive. If you do a lot of production work, but even if you're in the middle of writing a document or doing any other task, just being distracted like that and switching your brain to something else is generally not considered to be a very good thing.

30:13 Yeah. I look at it as, normally, it's a symptom. If I'm feeling unproductive, if I'm doing things like jumping onto email, it normally means there's something about the thing I'm doing that I should be, like it's not a task.

30:30 It's either not a task I want to do, like it can be a boring task, or it could be a task that I should be doing, but I'm scared to.

30:43 I've got to write a difficult email to a client about this, that, or the other. So, I kind of am like, "Oh, email has arrived. I will check that." Or even I'll be like, find myself checking the email when I actually meant to be writing it, because I sort of want something to make me too busy to do it.

31:08 Yeah, I'm always torn with it because we're running a service company. We're providing a service and people expect a good level of service, the good money they're paying. And if you're a bit too high and mighty about your communications, then people just feel neglected and they don't feel like they're getting a good service, and that affects your relationship and potentially your business with that client in the future.

31:39 So, it's all about keeping them happy, but there still is a balance. You don't have to reply to everything absolutely immediately. No, you don't. That's interesting.

31:49 So, what other tools do you use, Dan? I have like a Trello board. Personal one? Yeah, it's a personal. It's for personal work tasks. Every day and again, a personal task gets onto it, but it looks so out of place. I don't like it there.

32:13 Get your haircut. Yeah, I have a Google... Yeah, I have a Google notification every so many months to get my haircut that I ignore. I have another one to check everything's okay with the car, which I ignore.

32:31 How do you check everything's okay with the car? When you pop open the bonnet, scratch your chin. Oh, it all looks good to me.

32:43 Yes, Sean. You check like levels of things. I don't know. I don't know. I'm a very bad car owner, but I know that you're meant to like check things every now and again.

32:59 But I'll find out. You take it to the garage every year and get a service. Oh, yeah. It's not 1970. Well, that would be another notification in my calendar. So, yeah, I have a few legacy productivity bits going on that I generally get ignored. Then, yeah, I've just got this Trello list where everything... That's like a dump for everything I think of. I have a quite nice little widget on my phone, which is basically like just one button create a Trello card.

33:35 And so if I think of anything like, "Oh, need to pay that person their expenses," like just write in there, it'll end up in the list. And then at the beginning of each day, I try and just have a look at that list and cut out some bits that, yeah, triage it a bit. And then I don't want to tell you how much stuff's on that list organized into all kinds of ridiculous columns going off to the right, just things I've thought of, things I'm going to read one day.

34:06 And yeah, so it's kind of... But at the center of it all, there is like this kind of in-box list, which at least makes sure I remember everything. And then, yeah, like you, I use calendar. I did try doing a thing which nearly works, which is like where you kind of proactively put spaces in your calendar for stuff. So you say, "Here, I'm going to be doing project work.

34:34 Here, I'm available for meetings." But it doesn't work with doing what I'm doing because it's too restrictive on actually getting stuff done. Meeting's going to happen when everyone's available. It doesn't really matter if I've said that I'm supposed to be doing something else at that time, that's going to get ignored. And then as soon as you start ignoring it, that system's gone. So... Yeah, I keep a work calendar just for those communication times so that I know those can't be moved. And then I use Calendly a lot to help allow people to book time slots.

35:12 And then so that looks for those spaces and will only present the available time slots within the rules that I've defined in that app. Or if people need more flexibility, I just send them the public Google Calendar URL so that they can see the available spots without seeing any details of what I'm doing. Got you. And then just pick a time that suits them. And so are you like pro meetings or anti-meetings? Because this is another one. You see, there's no...

35:44 If you Google that, articles about toxic meetings... Oh my God. It goes to the point where you're scared to actually accept a meeting invite in case that person's secretly trying to trick you into looking like an unproductive idiot. I mean, I'm generally in favor of any kind of communication that helps the project. And I think the more communication you have on a project, the better the outcome. Whether that's a face-to-face meeting, whether it's a phone meeting, whether it's...

36:22 Everyone's already in the same room, so it doesn't matter so much, or whether people have to travel and/or dial in at different times and different time zones. It's worth making the effort to make sure meetings happen. I don't think meetings for meetings sake make any sense. They need to be productive. But because of the types of things we work on, most of the clients we work with, we don't end up in a lot of meetings. I think only when you work with much larger companies do you end up in meetings where you think, "Well, what on earth am I doing here? This seems to be a waste of my time." Most of the meetings we're in, we've arranged. And so they have a purpose.

37:02 Got you. Yeah. So I love a meeting. It's where you shine, is it now? Yeah. I want to sit in them all day. Well, I do end up sitting in them all day. But they do, yeah, I mean, they do take... I always worry how much of other people's time they're taking up, as in people that should be doing other work. But I do like them as... I think you're right. I think you've got to make sure you're constantly talking, and meetings are a pretty good way of doing that.

37:34 Depends what you define as a meeting there. Would you call a stand-up a meeting? I would. Yeah. I mean, it's an interruption to everyone. Yeah. But it's pretty important to the productivity of the project.

37:48 It is, absolutely. And also, I feel like there's problems on projects that just everyone can... I'm quite keen on setting a time to actually work on a piece of design together or something like that. Making sure that time's there to properly kick off things, make sure everyone knows what's going on. And I think you can always look at those meetings and say, "Well, what are they doing there?

38:20 They're taking up a lot of time." But hopefully, they save time later on. That's the problem with productivity. It's how you measure it.

38:31 Yeah. I mean, I don't think I ever come away from... Very, very rarely come away from a day at work and think today was not productive. That's really frustrating when it does happen, but I think it's all about perception. And some people just don't like meetings, I guess. And if they're in a couple of meetings today, they'll come up because they're really focused on production work or something, and that's their job. And they really feel like that's what they want to be doing and that's what they enjoy. But they may come away from a day full of meetings thinking, "Oh man, that was really unproductive." But I don't. I mean, anything I feel I've done to contribute to a project, I feel like I've been productive. Anything I feel like I've contributed to the business in general, including things that aren't currently projects, I feel like I've been productive. We've got stuff done.

39:28 It was worth coming into work today because if I didn't, I wouldn't have done those things. And I generally come away thinking, "I did my job well today." Wow. And then that's how you sleep so well.

39:46 I don't need to put it in my calendar after all. Absolutely. Just come over, there's smug satisfactions, and pat myself on the back.

40:00 Well, yeah, I mean, I generally feel like I've never done enough at all. So I'm always overestimating what I can achieve in a day. I did try at one point, again, always trying things to make myself feel better about productivity or do it better, where I was like, "Okay, I really just need to pick two or three things and say that if I do those today, I've hit my productivity goals." But that would have meant deferring some pretty vital tasks for weeks.

40:39 Be like, "Well, what day is it going to be two or three things that I'm actually going to do that bit of work and it would be pushed back miles because of client work, etc." Yes, no, I definitely have the opposite whereby I struggle to feel productive.

40:57 But I also do see it as I do now understand that that's how it is. And you learn how you feel about stuff. And I also see feeling unproductive often for me, as I said before, it's like a symptom of there's something I'm not on top of that I'm putting other tasks in the way of because I don't want to look under that stone and see how that bit of the business is going because I'm worried it's not going well or something like that. So I definitely have learned that that feeling is not one... I've sometimes made myself feel productive by not working. So rather than going flat out all day, if I do something like get a haircut, my God, take that half hour to go and get my haircut, I can finish that day feeling more productive because maybe that... It was my hair that was the... No, it was that lack of roundedness to the day that I was missing. Not just like, oh, I didn't get enough work done. So it's kind of like, I think it's like trying to... Yeah, I kind of have to try and understand what I'm feeling not productive because I can't actually do more. So it's a case of like making calls on why you're feeling like that and trying to fix that if you see what I mean. Like you're not going to fix it by just doing more work.

42:34 Yeah, yeah. And I guess I always try to make the... I don't think I... Maybe I do try to make it this way consciously, but there's never like a whole list of things that need to get done in a day that are the same type of thing. It's always quite a diverse range of things that need to be done.

42:54 And I think that in itself helps you feel like you've done more because you sort of spanned more topics, more verticals, rather than just having an endless checklist on one type of thing that you have to get done in one day. It's much easier to feel like perhaps you haven't achieved as much if you set yourself too much in one area and it just gets on top of you and you can't get through it all. And there's then still more ahead that you've got to complete. I think being a business owner, you're in a unique position where because you wear so many hats, there's so many different things you can do compared to perhaps some of your employees who you hired to do much more specific targeted tailored jobs. Yeah. Where you have the privilege of being able to diversify what you do a bit and by mixing things up, I find I feel like I have achieved a bit more.

43:54 Does that make sense? Yeah. And I know it does. And I think also there's you feel more productive when you're working on the right stuff as well. So I saw a great diagram once, which I'm going to explain out loud, which had like the importance of a task on one axis. So there's diagrams like a graph should start with that importance of the task on one axis and the like urgency of it on the other axis. And then so you've got like you can then cut that into four of things that aren't urgent and are important, are urgent but not important, are not urgent, but important and are important and urgent. And I think as a business owner, you spend all your time in that urgent, important space, but you have to mix it up with some stuff from the important but not urgent because that's what's going to, that's probably more likely to drive the business forward. So that's the stuff like documenting that process, not just doing it. So you're like, I've got to do this thing, that's urgent. And then I haven't got time to actually write down the steps I took to do it so that maybe one day someone else could do it, which actually is a more long term, you know, of more long term value. So it's kind of making sure that you spend some time on those things that are like going to be important in six months time. Because if you're just reacting and doing things like right at that tip of what comes in, then you just can feel like it's not your decisions, like you're not, you're not operating with free will, you're just being thrown things and having to handle them. And I think it's really important to shift over, I'll try and find a picture of it.

45:58 So you can stick in the show notes. If you do find it or drop it in the show notes. Yeah, it is difficult to understand what falls in each of those boxes. Like you said, I mean, we all give ourselves tasks, I've got a blog post about this, and you know, and you always put it as one of those low priority tasks. You think, oh, no one's going to see it, it's not going to do that much. You know, it's not nearly seen a couple hundred times in the next few months or something. Best case scenario. But you never know that writing that blog post could, a couple of months down the line, lead someone to your site organically that reads it, really agrees with what you have to say and gets in touch about a project that they have in mind and could win you a whole load of business to carry you forward to another couple of months. And therefore, if you had realized that at the time, it would have jumped way up the priority list. It's really hard to tell sometimes what is important and what isn't. And I try not to, obviously there are things that are important and are time sensitive and need to be done immediately and tomorrow.

47:03 So yeah, I mean, I think with the blog thing, it's if you think having a blog is important, I consider it to be important. So therefore, writing blog posts is also important because you don't have a blog without that. But it's never urgent. It's making sure that you do spend some time on those things that aren't absolutely demanding to be done right away because otherwise they'll never happen. You know, you could look at it as well as being like, you know, if we wanted to expand and take on a another developer. Now, if that was because there was a project on now, we'd be putting that as urgent, important, and I'd be considering calling recruiters, I'd be pushing out job ads and things like that. Whereas really, I should always be one eye on it's important to know developers that I could hire and put some effort into networking, some effort into thinking of ways to expand my network of developers so that when that moment comes, and it becomes urgent as well as important, it's easier to do and you get a better result.

48:20 So it's those long term versus short term, a lot of it isn't it? That's it. That's it. It's trying to live in that box as well of those two. And of course, you shouldn't be in the boxes of things that aren't important. That's the other thing. I think the guy that drew this, who's probably famous and I've forgotten who is, you know, was like, you shouldn't be never doing things that aren't urgent and aren't important and things that are urgent but not important, you should be delegating them. Yeah, if you can. Yeah, if you can. If you can.

49:02 I always feel bad about delegating as well, by the way. That's another thing that makes you feel bad, if especially for delegate bad things, or boring things. Yeah, sometimes it's got to be done. But if you haven't got anyone to delegate to, because you don't have someone who has those skill sets in the business, then you know, it falls on your shoulders as the business owner and you've got to knuckle down and get on with it. And to me, it all really just comes down to effective prioritization. And a lot of people find that quite difficult. And one of the lucky people who finds prioritization relatively easy, and I can look at a whole list of things and justify the order in which they should be done or if they should be done at all.

49:44 And a lot of people I know struggle with that, and it can be difficult. But I think it's key to successfully making a successful use of your time and coming away feeling like you've been productive, because you've been able to justify the order in which you've done things. And therefore, the things that top that list were the most important in your eyes. And that, to me, is one of the key things in making me feel good about my day and how productive I've been.

50:17 Yeah, definitely. That's what that beginning bit of my day is for, is you do have to spend some time analyzing the list of things to do and working out what order you're going to try and tackle things in. It normally goes out the window, but at least it's been done.

50:37 And she tried. Yeah, and it does help. It does some kind of time with a slightly clear mind to just have a look at them and go, well, what makes sense to try and do today? One final thing, an interesting slight aside, and you're obviously charged with being creative. Do you find that not being productive, like as in doing unproductive things, can lead to a creative outcome?

51:14 Does that make sense? Yeah. Like that YouTube time, Jon. That's what I'm talking about. Did you come off the back of the YouTube time and then solve the problem? I think you need time, and then you can expect anyone, yourself or your employees to sort of come in and give you seven and a half hours of 100% productivity. It's just not realistic. People need time to feel inspired, to have, they need distractions in their day in order to make sure that they're not just getting tired of doing what they're doing and lose interests. And I feel particularly that taking a short break from, especially doing creative work or production work in general, like stepping away from it for 10 or 15 minutes and coming back a little bit later really helps clear the mind and give you a fresh perspective. It's that typical shower time thing, right? You think about something all day, you go home, hop in a shower, and all of a sudden the time when you're relaxing, or as you're just going to bed, you start thinking about all these things. I keep a waterproof pattern pencil in the shower. Do you? So I can find some of this stuff done. Yeah, although it's recently been replaced by a Bluetooth shower speaker, I can just shove something into my to-do list from Siri.

52:44 We're getting some insight. Insight sits your home life. When you really start to switch off is when your brain just switches into a mode where ideas pop into your mind that you just weren't thinking of when you were really focused on it.

52:55 Because it's a typical thing that everyone experiences. And I think you need that throughout your day as well. This is why I think having a diverse range of things to work on is good. Because if you're just working on one thing all day, it is very difficult to keep your head down and stay focused and produce. No one can produce the best work they've ever done all the time. Ebs and flows. And you need to give people the space to be able to find the creativity and the skill that they need to be able to pull together a really excellent design with whatever they're doing. Yeah. Be that developing or designing or wire framing or any kind of production work in our field. I think you need to give people a little bit of space. How much is up to you? I definitely agree with that. And I also definitely think about things in that way, like generally hear theirs and we're going about things. And then I use that pressure of a deadline to actually put them into a coherent form and to put it out in front of people. And that doesn't feel organized. It doesn't feel great. But that is how it works. And I think just recognizing, I think productivity, if I was going to round it off, productivity, it requires an understanding of yourself and when you're good and when you're not good. And just taking a look at how you feel at that point in time can often tell you what to work on and what to try and achieve. And I think if you get into that in touch with that side of things, you can end up being more productive, I think. And as you start to hire people to take over roles that you're doing, I always say to people who have young businesses, if you come to a point where you need someone to do something specific like new business or design or development or anything, really, HR, whatever stage you're at where you need someone to start taking things over, think carefully about the level of the person you want to bring in. As a small and new business, it's often tempting to just go for the cheapest possible person you can find, get someone junior to take it over. That isn't going to solve all your problems. All that's going to do is give you a big training overhead to get that person up to speed on what you need to do. Sometimes, especially when you're smaller, it can make a lot more sense to hire someone who has more experience, someone more senior, who is more capable of taking on board a lot of the responsibility you want to put onto that role and therefore free you up, which is the real reason you're hiring them, especially when you're small, so that you can focus on other things. So they're on boarding and then getting up to being a productive member of staff is a much shorter pathway. Whereas if you hire someone junior, you could be talking months or even years, you could take six months to train someone up to get to a level of productivity where you can step away enough to not be completely hands-on and then maybe then you stay with you for 18 months anyway and you've only got a year of really productive time out of them for all the time that you put in. So just bear that in mind. Yeah, that harks back to the investing in kind of documenting the process. If you've got those, like the more you've done that, then the more you can get away with hiring someone a bit more junior because they've got the instructions to learn off, you don't have to be teaching them directly. But yeah, you're completely right. Like it's... But who does that? I don't know, man. People that have read the books. Because at times they write the rule book. Yeah, I've read the books. I don't understand. I just bite the bullet and hire someone more senior. That's still happening. The mythical productivity people that taunt me so with their media posts and their books and their podcasts. Yeah, so there you go. Get productive, write a medium post about it, write a book. I'll buy it. Well, I won't. Dan will. And you'll tell me all about it. I'll try it. Just let me know what I've got to do, please. So I think there is no golden rule. There is no system that suits everyone. You do what works for you. You try a little bit of everything, mix things up a bit. Everyone's different. And you just got to work within the bounds of what you know you're capable of doing. And don't be too hard on yourself. That's what I'd say. That's definitely it. Don't beat yourself up for being unproductive. As long as you've done something positive for your business or a project today, you've been productive. You've done well. You've done your job. Yeah, cool. Excellent. So thanks to everyone for listening. I've been John Dark at Dark John on Twitter from Every Interaction. You can find us online at everyinteraction.com on the webs and @everyinteract on Twitter. If you would like to contact us about this episode or find any of our past episodes, you can do so on the website, perspective.fm, or you can send us an email directly to get@perspective.fm. You can find us on iTunes. And as always, we appreciate any ratings and reviews. You might leave us there. Tweet about the show. Share it on Facebook. Everything helps. You can find us in all of your podcasting apps of choice. Just search for perspective.fm in Google Music, Apple Podcasts, App Overcast, Pocket art casts, whatever it is that you use. And Dan, where can people find out about you? Personally, I'm @gentersmaximus on Twitter. Lighthouse London are wearelighthouse.com @wearelighthouse on Twitter. That's where you can find me. Wonderful. All those links along with everything that we've talked about today, they should be on the website along with the show notes for this episode. So thanks everybody. And we'll see you next time. Cheers, Dan. Cheers, John.