Navigate multiple roles successfully
With crowdsourcing, prioritization and context scheduling
Welcome to another edition of ProductiveGrowth 🌱, weekly stories about productivity, leadership, motivation, and anything else that helps us and our teams grow and be more productive. Plus, industry news on the companies, products, and services that allow us to work less and do more.
TL;DR
If you’re an entrepreneur, have started a company while holding a day job or just have had to handle several roles at once, you are familiar with how hard context switching can be. Sometimes, it might seem like an impossible task to perform, the level of stress and fatigue being unbearable. When I first started in the business, I thought I was the only one going through it, and that I needed some special feature I didn’t have to succeed.
Turned out all I needed was learning how to organize my time and priorities to achieve what I was aiming to, and I did! So, today, I want you to go through some of the things that helped me manage my time without going crazy and build all the companies I’ve been a part of. Hope you enjoy it!
Steve.
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EDITOR’S PICKS
📝 Is not about what you do but how you do it
Prioritization is important, but doing it the right way is crucial. Choosing what to actually care about — and what to completely forget about — can make a great impact over your productivity. This type of decision-making is needed to handle your business properly, especially when you’re creating your company while working for somebody else. In a conversational set of examples, coach Lynette Bye uses five existing concepts to explain how you can prioritize better. With techniques like career planning, tackling bottlenecks like anxiety or fatigue, and creating high-value rest time, you can reduce uncertainty, make choices based on best guesses, and create a valuable prioritization habit.
🔝 Tips from the guy at the top of the entrepreneurship game
As the CEO of three successful companies, Elon Musk knows a thing or two about switching contexts successfully and has mastered the art of simultaneously navigating between roles. His tips on productivity might help you become a strong entrepreneur like him, This article from Boss Personal Planner offers seven of Musk’s top productivity tips, like number three, “batching”: make tiny tasks like reading or answering emails while you eat or play with your kids which, unlike the constant switching that comes with multitasking, involve a similar mindset and won’t leave you tired.
🙌 Being successful doesn’t have to come with downsides
This might sound like a paradox, but if you’re feeling alone on your way to success, then you’re probably not. Having a huge weight on your shoulders and a constant need to shine and make this world a better place can be tiring and hard to understand for the people around you. Recognizing this and working towards a mentally healthy mindspace is not only a survival path, you’ll also find out it is the only way to become who you want to be. Learn how to manage it by crowdsourcing your health, and remember to stop, smell the roses, and savor the entire process.
📅 Control your schedule so it doesn’t control you
While multitasking might feel helpful —and, honestly, the only way to get stuff done—, research shows we’re more productive when we’re focusing on only one thing at a time. Managing to concentrate is not magic but something you can achieve with context scheduling. Also called block scheduling or time blocking, context schedule is the practice of allocating large chunks of time to related tasks so you don’t end up burned out. This makes it easier to travel from one task to the next. Since I’ve dedicated my Mondays to meetings, I stopped feeling overwhelmed by my calendar!
1 Quote
“Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once.” - Drew Huston.
1 Question
What’s the best way to focus on one thing at a time?
DISCOVER
If you struggle with keeping your tasks organized and decluttered, you’ve probably tried a task manager app before. Unfortunately, task managers can sometimes make work even harder. But Pagico 9’s drag-and-drop interface allows you to keep meaningful timelines for your to-dos and to see the progress you’ve made in just a few clicks. You can visually personalize your boards so they make sense to you and only you. Read more about it here.
IN THE KNOW
Industry news on the companies, products, and services that allow us to work less and do more.
Sales, IPOs, Bankruptcies, Funding and Industry Gossip
Streaming-technology innovators Parsec raise $25 million “to make it easier for people to connect to their technology, software and content from anywhere, on any device.”
Great year for streaming services: BoxCast raises $20 million to make live streaming events accessible to anyone.
Releases
Notion will be releasing a public beta of their API next year. The waitlist is insane!
Attention, Mac users: Microsoft 365 apps are now compatible with Apple M1 chips, making it easier for people that have been leaving Intel chips behind.
Job Opportunities
Ally.io - Bellevue, US - Head of People and Culture
Coda - San Francisco, US - Project Manager
Meister - Vienna, Austria - Junior Customer Success Agent
Events
Dec 21st (virtual) - Mindfulness-Based Leadership by Dr. Keren Tsuk
Dec 24th-25th (Vienna, AT) - International Conference on Leadership and Management by World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
Jan 8th 2021 (Virtual) - How to improve your productivity and focus by Guardian Masterclasses
Jan 13th 2021 (Virtual) - ATX January Event with Jason Reynolds by Miro
Jan 21st 2021 (Virtual) - Principles of Purposeful Productivity by Kerrie Martin
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Edited by: Lauren Maslen.
